Government trustees conduct natural resource damage assessments (NRDAs) to hold firms liable for damages caused by their pollution. We analyze a model in which a trustee chooses NRDA accuracy and a firm chooses precaution in response, where increased NRDA accuracy increases expense but decreases...

We demonstrate how choice experiment survey methods can be used to guide ecosystem restoration efforts. We use a choice experiment survey to estimate willingness to pay (WTP) for different attributes of restored grassland ecosystems. We find that the presence of nearby grasslands increases a...

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...

We investigate the effectiveness of voluntary pollution prevention activities in reducing toxic releases from facilities that reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory from 1991–2001, using generalized method of moments dynamic panel data models that...

The corporate approach to environmental protection has been evolving from a regulation-driven reactive mode to a more proactive approach involving voluntarily adopted management systems that integrate environmental concerns with traditional managerial functions. Several hypotheses about the...

This paper examines, empirically, the mechanism by which a voluntary pollution reduction program (VPR) achieves pollution reductions. We find that participation in the 33/50 program, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s first VPR, spurred the adoption of total quality environmental...

This paper reevaluates the effectiveness of the EPA’s voluntary 33/50 program in reducing the releases of 17 high-priority toxic chemicals for the 1988–1995 period. Contrary to previous studies that use program participation information at the firm level and find mixed evidence on the...