Concerns about nutrient pollution in the Chesapeake Bay have led to the establishment of pollution limits — total maximum daily loads (TMDLs) — which, by 2025, are expected to reduce nitrogen loadings to the Bay by 25 percent and phosphorous loadings by 24 percent from current levels. This...

Assessment of climate change policies requires aggregation of costs and benefits over time and across generations, a process ordinarily done through discounting. Choosing the correct discount rate has proved controversial and highly consequential. To clarify past analysis and guide future work,...

This paper computes national carbon mitigation costs using two simple principles: (1) Incremental costs for low-carbon energy investments are calculated using the cost of coal-fired power as the benchmark. (2) All low-carbon energy sources are counted, because reducing carbon emissions cannot be...

Many non-market valuation models, such as the Ricardian model, have been estimated using cross sectional methods with a single year of data. Although multiple years of data should increase the robustness of such methods, repeated cross sections suggest the results are not stable. We argue that...

We test the hypothesis that respondents stating divergent reasons for choice uncertainty differ in their probability to vote yes in a CV setting. We introduce the use of a follow-up question used to classify uncertain respondents according to reason for uncertainty. Results indicate that...

Since Soviet times Lake Ülemiste has been closed to public access. The current practice of Tallinn may entail unnecessary losses of benefits to the local population. The aim of this paper is to find the value of the foregone benefits. In order to find this value, a contingent valuation (CVM)...

This paper investigates variations in the adoption of LEED-certified commercial buildings across 174 CBSA in the United States. Drawing upon a unique database and using a robust analytical framework, the determinants of the proportion LEED-certified space are modeled. We find that, despite high...

As vessel traffic in the Baltic increases, in particular oil transports from Russia to the international market, so too does the risk of oil spills which above the environmental impacts impose costs on society including direct costs, market costs and non-market costs (e.g., losses in welfare...