The existence of compensating differentials in Russian labor and housing markets is examined using data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) augmented by city and regional-specific characteristics from other sources. While Russia is undergoing transition to a market economy, we...

Interstate environmental harms, which occur when decisions or actions in one state produce negative environmental impacts in another state, have challenged environmental law and American federalism for over a century. While even the strongest advocates of state primacy in environmental policy...

Na and Shin (1998) showed that the veil of uncertainty can be conducive to the success of self-enforcing international environmental agreements. Later papers confirmed this negative conclusion about the role of learning. In the light of intensified research efforts worldwide to reduce...

This paper examines the two externalities that a country's environmental regulation imposes on other country's welfare: an environmental externality, due to transboundary pollution, and, a competitive advantage externality, as regulations affect domestic firms' abatement costs, which impact the...

Many economics texts cover the economics of controlling negative production externalities. Most authors introduce their analysis by examining a tax on the output of polluting firms, sometimes called a "simple Pigovian tax." They then often point out that taxing pollution directly is more...

Due to the high transaction cost that would be necessary for large numbers of people to negotiate with each other, even those who are sanguine about private markets become reserved when externalities affect large populations. The distinction between private and societal interest is well...

Pigou (1920) advocated for taxes, set equal to marginal damages, on goods produced and consumed that involve negative externalities. Samuelson (1954) laid out the conditions for optimal pure public goods provision, but noted that free-riding (the “demand revelation” problem) was likely to...

In this chapter both theory and empirics are used to show that our picture of the processes of economic development changes radically when nature is introduced as a capital asset. Particular features of institutions that fashion societies' use of the natural-resource base are identified and...

The extent of genetic diversity in food crops is important as it affects the risk of attack by pathogens. A drop in diversity increases this risk. Farmers may not take this into account when making crop choices, leading to what from a social perspective is an inadequate level of diversity