Proposals for marginal cost water pricing have often been found to be politically infeasible because current users will have to pay a higher price even though future users will be better off. We show how efficiency pricing can be rendered Pareto-improving, and thus politically feasible, by...

Several authors have argued that the second-best environmental tax on a "dirty good" is less than the marginal emission damage associated with its consumption. These studies limit their analysis to cases in which emissions can only be reduced by a proportional reduction of the "dirty" good. With...

Invasive species change ecosystems and the economic services such ecosystems provide. Optimal policy will minimize the expected damages and costs of prevention and control. We seek to explain policy outcomes as a function of biological and economic factors, using the case of Hawaii to...

The sources of production risk are many and diverse in nature. Estimating risk as a black box, without explicit recognition of its sources, can lead to inferior estimates of optimal inputs under risk aversion. In this paper, a method is presented for estimating production functions with...

The problem investigated is how to estimate expected profits and the risk of using nitrogenous fertilizer for purposes of making fertilizer recommendations and explaining farmer decisions. Three inappropriate methods are discussed and a new method is developed which combines experimentally...

A central pillar of the sustainability movement is the call to include environmental accounting in standard measures of economic performance. This increased transparency would, in principle, mitigate the temptation of economic managers and policy makers to increase growth in material consumption...