As economists took up the task of measuring the "demand" for environmental services not traded in markets, some chose to substituted survey-based methods known as contingent valuation (CV). Doing so, they could not help but find themselves in the uncomfortable position of self-evidently...

This paper illustrates how public goods may be incorporated into a cost-of-living index. When public goods are weak complements to a market good, quality-adjusted prices for the market good capture all the welfare information required. They are also consistent with a Laspeyres index that...

Environmental policy analyses increasingly require the evaluation of benefits from large changes in spatially differentiated public goods. Such changes are likely to induce general equilibrium effects through changes in household expenditures and local migration, yet current practice "transfers"...

The environmental justice literature convincingly shows that poor people and minorities live in more polluted neighborhoods than do other groups. These findings have sparked a broad activist movement, numerous local lawsuits, and several federal policy reforms. Despite the importance of...

Over the past fifty years, economists have developed methods for estimating the public benefits of green spaces, allowing such information to be incorporated into land-use planning. But the extent to which it is ever used is unclear. This paper reviews the literature on public values for lands...

Traditional cross-sectional estimates of hedonic price functions theoretically can recover marginal willingness to pay for characteristics, but face endogeneity problems when some characteristics are unobserved. To help overcome such problems, economists have introduced difference-in-differences...

As economists took up the task of measuring the "demand" for environmental services not traded in markets, some chose to substituted survey-based methods known as contingent valuation (CV). Doing so, they could not help but find themselves in the uncomfortable position of self-evidently...

This paper explores the importance of continuity assumptions in hedonic price functions. Using a set of actual housing data to mimic a realistic city, and using a set of known preference orderings, it simulates a housing market to recover equilibrium prices. It then estimates price regressions...