Recycling efforts recovered about 55 million tons of municipal solid waste through approximately 9,000 curbside recycling programs and about 10,000 drop-off centers in 1996 (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 1998). We investigate economic impacts of this activity using state-level data...

In residential solid waste management, the United States has a great deal of experience in applying incentive-based environmental policy in the form of unit pricing. This study examines the two most common forms of unit pricing practiced in the United States. It offers intuition and empirical...

The protection of children's health has recently become a mandated priority for federal policy makers. To assess many of the regulations that affect children's health, policy makers need estimates of the monetary value of reducing mortality risks to children. Although the economics literature...

Payments to communities from landfill developers in exchange for permission to construct, expand, or operate a landfill have become popular. The value of this host compensation varies widely, yet the factors that influence it are unexplored. We construct a unique data set of host fees paid by...

Over the past five decades, the U.S. government has enacted laws and developed regulations to respond to actual and threatened releases of hazardous substances. This article describes a relatively understudied component of the nation's response capability: the Superfund Emergency Response and...

The EPA has a cornucopia of cleanup and reuse programs ranging from the Superfund Program which addresses sites posing imminent danger and many of the most hazardous sites nationwide, to the Brownfields Program which addresses lower risk sites. These programs provide a common set of primary...

There is substantial evidence that hazardous and solid waste facilities are located disproportionately in communities of color. While there are many potential explanations, one contributing factor might be that policy makers treat waste facilities differently, depending on the racial makeup of...

Strong local opposition to the construction of solid waste landfills has become commonplace and the siting of landfills in the United States is time consuming and expensive. To ease the siting process, host compensation in exchange for permission to construct a landfill has become popular. The...

Over the past five decades, the federal government has enacted laws and developed regulations to manage actual and threatened hazardous releases. This paper describes a relatively understudied component of the nation’s response capability – the Superfund Emergency Response and Removal (ERR)...