Since 1982, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has used benefit-cost analysis to evaluate many of its surface water quality regulations. Early regulations were aimed at controlling conventional and toxic pollutants that were directly linked to highly visible water quality problems. More...

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...

Both biologists and economists are concerned about invasive species. There are several well-documented instances in which biological invaders have done extensive damage. This has led some economists to conclude that biological invaders should be treated as a form of "pollution", and that the...

There has been great interest in recent decades in “ecosystem services”. One of the services most often mentioned is the retention of nutrients. I construct a simple model of agricultural land use under a regulatory requirement that nutrient loading cannot exceed a fixed ceiling develop...

There has been considerable recent interest in the idea that farms can produce both food and a variety of ecosystem services. One particularly intriguing notion is that farmers might find it in their own interest to adopt an “ecosystem services” approach to production in preference to a...