A major environmental tragedy of modern times is the widespread arsenic contamination of shallow drinking water wells in rural Bangladesh which went unrecognized for years. Large numbers of people are now starting to show a range of symptoms long associated with chronic arsenic exposure. Rural...

Disagreement among researchers regarding types of optimal choice experiments is often best seen as resulting from differences in the set of assumptions researchers are willing to make about the underlying data generating process. Much of the current debate may have confused, rather than...

In 1992 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) convened a panel of prominent social scientists to assess the reliability of natural resource damage estimates derived from contingent valuation (CV). The product of the panel's deliberations was a report that laid out a set of...

The price, output, and quality of a monopolistic competitor are determined by maximizing the difference between its revenue and its cost, where cost is measured exclusive of the rent on its product-specialized inputs. It can be argued that such a firm must have unique inputs that are specialized...

The past few years have seen a highly charged debate about whether contingent valuation (CV) surveys can provide valid economic measures of people's values for environmental resources. In an effort to appraise the validity of CV measures of economic value, a distinguished panel of social...

This paper deals with the problem of achieving growth that will sustain itself over the long term, viewed from the standpoint of the sources of economic growth, the limits to growth, and how growth is affected by government policy choices, as well as the nature of the economy and the nature of...

This note argues that, broadly speaking, democracies have a comparative advantage over dictatorships in keeping rent-seeking costs down by imposing penalties that reduce returns to scale in rent-seeking. Dictatorships have a comparative advantage in restricting the number of rent-seekers through...