Communities in the United States are showing increasing interest in the use of forests, wetlands, and other natural areas to provide protection against extreme events. As the climate changes and such events become more frequent and/or more severe, investments in the conservation of natural areas...

Water withdrawals for the energy sector are the largest use of fresh water in the United States. Using an econometric model of monthly plant-level electricity generation levels between 2001 and 2012, we estimate the effect of water scarcity on the US electricity fuel mix. We find that...

A deposit-refund system combines a tax on product consumption with a rebate when the product or its packaging is returned for recycling. Deposit-refunds are used for beverage containers, lead-acid batteries, motor oil, tires, various hazardous materials, electronics, and more. In addition,...

The two main hurdles to a widespread carbon capture and storage (CCS) deployment are: cost and social acceptance issues. Assessing a ccurately social preferences is thus interesting to determine whether CCS is socially optimal. Unlike most academic papers that have a dichotomous approach and...

The first phase of the REDD+ mechanism consists of helping countries to improve their capacity to carry out national forest inventories, notably to assess land-use changes and forest carbon stocks and fluxes. However, there might be some links between the funding of this first phase and the...

This paper reviews the economic justification for voluntary environmental programs to derive defensible measures of their positive social outcomes. We consider ideal experimental and statistical designs to detect and attribute benefits. We also explore a set of more practical approaches to...

Several recent studies have used simulation models to quantify the potential effects of recent environmental regulations on power plants, including the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), one of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s most expensive regulations. These studies have...