When external effects are important, markets will be inefficient, and economists have considered several broad classes of economic instruments to correct these inefficiencies. However, the standard economic analysis has tended to neglect important distinctions and interactions between the...

When external effects are important, markets will be inefficient, and economists have considered several broad classes of economic instruments to correct these inefficiencies. However, the standard economic analysis has tended to take the region, and the government, as a given; that is, this...

Tiebout’s (1956) suggestion that people “vote with their feet” to find the community that provides their optimal bundle of taxes and public goods has played a central role in the theory of local public finance over the past 50 years. Given the central importance of Tiebout’s insights,...

This paper advocates consistently defined units of account to measure the contributions of nature to human welfare. We argue that such units have to date not been defined by environmental accounting advocates and that the term “ecosystem services” is too ad hoc to be of practical use in...

This paper provides a review of the science pertaining to all aspects of acidification in the Adirondack Park, updating an earlier review of the science (Cook et al. 2002). The review supports an ongoing social science investigation into the willingness to pay for ecological improvements that...

We document the sensitivity of welfare estimates derived from discrete choice models to assumptions about the choice set. Such assumptions can affect welfare estimates through both the estimated parameters of the model and, conditional on the parameters, the substitution among alternatives. Our...

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"...

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...

This paper suggests two theoretically consistent and empirically tractable ways that a cost-ofliving index can be expanded to include the environment and other public goods. In addition, it presents an empirical illustration of such an index for Los Angeles, California, incorporating air quality...