The use of voluntary approaches to achieve environmental improvements has grown dramatically in the United States since they were first introduced thirteen years ago. As of 2004, there are over 50 voluntary programs in the U.S. at the federal level alone. These programs take a variety of forms,...

Many environmental justice studies argue that firms choose to locate waste sites or polluting plants disproportionately in minority or poor communities. However, it is not uncommon for these studies to match site or plant location to contemporaneous socioeconomic characteristics instead of to...

Economists have long been interested in explaining the spatial distribution of economic activity, focusing on what factors motivate profit-maximizing firms when they choose to open a new plant or expand an existing facility. We begin our paper with a general discussion of the theory of plant...

In the environmental justice literature, evidence of disproportionate siting in poor or minority neighborhoods is decidedly mixed. Some allege this is due to the difference in whether the study looks at evidence at the national, state, or city level. Here, I compare results from two of the...

Rapid urbanization and increased industrialization have led to high pollution levels throughout Latin America. Economists tout policies based on market-based economic incentives as the most cost-effective methods for addressing a wide variety of environmental problems. This chapter examines...

The standard theory that the first-best tax on pollution is equal to marginal environmental damages has been extended in two directions. First, many polluting activities are difficult to tax because they are not market transactions, and so recent papers have shown that the same effects can be...