The economics of fiscal federalism has identified two book-end departures from first-best provision of a public good. Local governments may respond to local conditions, but ignore inter-jurisdictional spillovers. Alternatively, central governments may internalize spillovers, but impose uniform...

When external effects are important, markets will be inefficient, and economists have considered several broad classes of economic instruments to correct these inefficiencies. However, the standard economic analysis has tended to take the region, and the government, as a given; that is, this...

Urban sprawl has become a policy concern of national prominence. One tool that has been suggested for combating sprawl is the land or split-rate tax. In theory, such taxes can raise the ratio of housing capital to land. This in turn can raise the density of housing units where it is applied, if...

From 1998 to 2006, over three-quarters of the more than 1,550 U.S. referenda targeting open space passed. We analyze the success of the conservation movement at holding referenda in areas with greater ecological value and greater likelihood of supporting conservation. To do so, we first analyze...

This paper suggests two theoretically consistent and empirically tractable ways that a cost-ofliving index can be expanded to include the environment and other public goods. In addition, it presents an empirical illustration of such an index for Los Angeles, California, incorporating air quality...

This paper provides new estimates of efficient emission fees for sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOX) emissions in the U.S. electricity sector. The estimates are obtained by coupling a detailed simulation model of the U.S. electricity markets with an integrated assessment model that...

The purpose of this article is to report a new approach for measuring the general equilibrium willingness to pay for large changes in spatially delineated public goods such as air quality. We estimate the parameters of a locational equilibrium model and compute equilibria for alternative...

This paper describes the construction of an ecological services index (ESI). An ESI is meant to summarize and track over time the magnitude of beneficial services arising from the natural environment. A central task of this paper is to define rigorously ecosystem services so that services can be...