Water-quality trading is an area of active development in environmental markets. Unlike iconic national-scale air-emission trading programs, water-quality trading programs address local or regional water quality and are largely the result of innovations in water-pollution regulation by state or...

Extant point-nonpoint trading programs involve trades of relatively certain point source emissions reductions for highly uncertain estimates of nonpoint reductions. Trade ratios, or uncertainty ratios, define the rate at which these imperfect substitute commodities are traded. Economic research...

Tackling the problem of ecosystem services degradation is an important policy challenge. Different types of economic instruments have been employed by conservation agencies to meet this challenge. Notable among them are Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes that pay private landowners to...

This research explores the welfare consequences of substituting carbon taxes for conventional distortionary taxes in a small open economy, using Pennsylvania as case study. A computable general equilibrium (CGE) model is developed for Pennsylvania to simulate possible outcomes when carbon taxes...

High rates of commercial fertilizer and animal manure application on cropland have been identified as an important cause of ground and surface water degradation in many areas of the country. Suggested remedies are often based on the idea that fertilization levels are economically irrational for...

There is considerable interest in watershed-based water quality protection. However, the approach can be highly information intensive, necessitating decisions about the types and amounts of data used to guide decisions. This study examines the Bayesian value of different types and amounts of...

Increasingly, environmental problems are recognized to involve linkages across multiple environmental variables (e.g., pollution and a fishery). Prior work on managing these complex, linked systems generally focuses on efficiency rather than implementation. However, implementation is important...

Following Weitzman (1974), there is ample theoretical literature indicating that choice of pollution control instruments under conditions of uncertainty will affect the expected net benefits that can be realized from environmental protection. However, there is little empirical research on the ex...

The study explores the implications of climate change for the economic costs of ecological conservation and restoration of submerged aquatic vegetation. It develops a methodological framework that addresses the key issues of uncertainty, irreversibility and space in climate change and...

The implications of transactions costs for the performance of water pollution trading involving point and nonpoint sources are examined. The analysis focuses on the impacts of transaction costs on different classes of trading partners and its consequence on the trading equilibrium. The model of...