Every summer, a dead zone is created in the Chesapeake Bay. The dead zone is created by too much of a good thing: nutrients, especially nitrogen and phosphorus. The largest source of excess nutrients in the Chesapeake is agriculture; manure and artificial fertilizers are washed into streams that...

How do the material aspects of intermediary work affect regulators, targets, and beneficiaries? To shed light on this question, we studied an information intermediary in the form of a website and the organizations who founded it. Specifically, we analyzed FracFocus, a self-regulatory initiative...

This article, focusing on produce and grain, discusses the environmental and climate change impacts of food production, processing, packaging, and distribution, which ultimately contributes to both economic and social costs. The article addresses environmental energy costs in the food supply

Illegal waste disposal is one of the most important environmental problems worldwide. An increasing number of countries apply criminal sanctioning to environmental offenders, based on the notion, but without any evidence that such sanctions provide deterrence. The present paper studies the...

I show that British electricity tariffs create substantial welfare loss, equivalent to between six and eighteen percent of domestic consumption value. Losses are greater than unpriced distributional and environmental counter effects. Expected technological change will increase this welfare loss....

Cleaning up contaminated sites is one of the most important environmental policy priorities in many countries. Remediation of contaminated sites is attractive because it reduces risks to human health and ecological systems, and brings a host of potential social and economic benefits. Even when...

This paper compares, in the context of hazardous waste generation, the effects of joint and several liability on capital and production decisions to the effects of several only liability. Our main result shows that increased potential liability causes firms to decrease asset exposure, but may...

Where is the environment in environmental law? People often subconsciously assume that “the environment” exists outdoors. Although it may seem benign, this assumption can affect when, how, and how effectively environmental law and policy addresses indoor and even outdoor environmental...

Plastics convey enormous benefits to humankind, but current patterns of plastic production, use, and disposal with little attention to sustainable design and a near absence of recovery, reuse, and recycling are responsible for grave harms to health, great economic costs, and deep societal...