This paper reviews water quality investments that can increase the environment’s capacity to remove nutrients. The nutrient removal effectiveness, uncertainty, and cost of removing nutrients directly from ambient waters is compared to agricultural nonpoint source reductions in the context of...

Numerous reforms to introduce financial incentives and flexibility into the Clean Water Act have been proposed. Cooperative organizational forms that consolidate multiple regulated entities under a single organizational umbrella are an overlooked, but potentially useful avenue for reform. In...

Federal and state regulatory agencies frequently support and encourage the use of market-based effluent trading to achieve social water quality goals. This paper evaluates the design of the recently approved Virginia Nutrient Trading Program. The cost implications of setting a near limit of...

As the environmental policy recommendations of economists become more acceptable, differences in the professional understanding of, and support for, different policy forms are becoming more apparent. These different approaches to environmental policy and research are described around a taxonomy...

The cost estimates to meet agriculture reduction goals for the Bay run into the billions. Most cost models, however, are based on simplifying behavioral assumptions about public transaction costs, adoption rates, and implementation costs of agricultural nutrient-reducing practices (called best...

This paper compares agricultural nonpoint source crediting procedures between the Pennsylvania and Virginia nutrient trading programs. Differences in farm-level credit production across states will be evaluated for agricultural operations, holding nutrient reduction technologies constant. The...

What an economist argues about managing the hazards of new production technologies depends on that individual's beliefs about the scientific credibility of assessed risk of new technologies, about the meaning of voluntary risk and compensations, and about the meaning of "progress" and "nature."...