National government-funded payments for environmental services (PES) programs often lack sustainable financing and fail to target payments to providers of important environmental services. In principle, these problems can be mitigated by supplementing government financing with contributions from...

Using a quasi-field experiment, we report on subjects' perceptions of the risks of hurricanes. All experimental subjects were displaced by either Hurricane Katrina or Rita, in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas, except for a small control group consisting of people who live in central Texas....

The 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act created a trading program in sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions that has served as the seminal example of how an emissions trading program could be designed. Yet despite its success, the trading program was essentially brought to an end by a series of...

Travel cost models are routinely used to assess the impact of policy changes on consumer’ s surplus. In this paper we show that when the policy change leads to a partial closure of the resource, then the standard use of consumer’ s surplus per trip can be inappropriate depending upon the...

Despite two decades of debate, there remains little consensus about what sustainability is, and how it should be achieved. Economists primarily portray sustainability as a macro-level concern, but there has been less attention on the implications of this social objective for policies related to...

We explore the distributional consequences of various fee schemes and other policy programs to reduce overfishing in the gulf of Mexico recreational fishery. The econometric model allows the marginal utility of income to vary across three income groups. We find that flat fees have a strong...

Environmental economists have traditionally addressed the issue of choice under uncertainty by applying the expected utility hypothesis. When policymakers face a panel of experts with widely divergent beliefs, the problem may more accurately be described as a case of choice under pure...