An in-class game can be used to improve students' understanding of how a TDP program might work. There are, however, tradeoffs one must face in designing such a game. An exercise might, in theory, demonstrate all the nuances of a TDP program and yet be so complex that students learn little from...

Urgent calls for actions to slow climate change have stimulated new interest in actions to harness the potential for carbon sequestration on agricultural lands. The private sector has established corporate goals for reducing contributions to climate change and there has been much decentralized...

A quarter of all species around the globe are threatened with extinction; this article reviews research in economics on how best to counter those threats. Normative research has developed useful tools for cost-effectively choosing areas of habitat to protect. Such work has also designed...

This paper evaluates the welfare and greenhouse-gas effects of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) in the presence of biofuel subsidies. In our numerical model, demand for gasoline and ethanol stems from consumer demand for driving miles, but all fuels have congestion and environmental external...

The dominant paradigm of conservation-reserve planning in economics is to optimize the provision of physical conservation benefits given a budget constraint, implicitly assuming the value of biodiversity and ecosystem function is not affected by human proximity to that natural capital. There is...

When natural resource damages are caused by releases of hazardous materials into the environment, government trustees must conduct Natural Resource Damage Assessments (NRDAs) to support claims to recover the value of lost or damaged resources. This article sets forth theoretical arguments that...

It is difficult for public agencies to make optimal reserve-site selections without knowing how new public reserves might influence the configuration of private conservation. Private land trusts protect much land in the USA, but little is known about how private groups respond to conservation...

The number of land trusts in a state varies widely across the United States. Could such variation make economic sense? This paper models the optimal number of private conservation agents in a region and highlights two competing forces: spatial externalities in conservation that increase the...

Factors that decrease the time cost of recycling have significant positive correlations with recycling rates in multifamily dwellings (MFDs). Waste-management experts have previously used anecdotes to infer a link between convenience and waste-diversion rates in MFD recycling programs. This...