This chapter provides an overview of the current methodology for assessing environmental health risks. Our primary focus is on the practices that U.S. regulatory agencies use for assessing cancer risk, although we also provide a brief comparison to the methodology used in Western Europe. We then...

This chapter explores how economists use experimental methods to understand better the behavioral underpinnings of environmental valuation. Economic experiments, in the lab or field, are an attractive tool to address intricate incentive and contextual questions that arise in assessing values...

Cognitive psychology is best known, to many environmental economists, through the filter of acrimonious debates over the validity of contingent valuation methods (CVM). Psychologists' views on CVM reflect concerns that are deeply rooted in their profession's history and theories. Although...

Value estimates for environmental goods can be obtained by either estimating preference parameters as revealed through behavior related to some aspect of the amenity or using stated information concerning preferences for the good. In the environmental economics literature the stated preference...

One of the only places where environmental quality is traded on explicit markets is real estate. There are several techniques that can be used to study the effects of environmental quality on property values and infer willingness to pay for improvements. The most commonly used method is the...

Travel cost recreation demand models stem from a simple, but penetrating, insight. Consumption of an outdoor recreation site's services requires the user to incur the costs of a trip to that site. Travel costs serve as implicit prices. These costs reflect both people's distances from recreation...

This chapter explores the theory and practice of measuring the economic costs and benefits of environmental changes that influence production, both in the context of firms and of households. The theory uses models of household and firm decision making to map the influence of environmental...

We analyze in this chapter decision-making when costs and benefits of an action are uncertain, that is, when future preferences are uncertain. We begin, in Section 2, with the classical analysis by Krutilla et al. (1972) of whether the expected consumer's surplus is a correct measure of the net...

Public policies that lead to a reduction in the emissions of air and water pollutants or the protection of sensitive ecosystems presumably increase the well-being of many members of society. Applied welfare economists are accustomed to measuring the welfare effects of policies that invoke price...