There is substantial evidence that hazardous and solid waste facilities are located disproportionately in communities of color. While there are many potential explanations, one contributing factor might be that policy makers treat waste facilities differently, depending on the racial makeup of...

Economists have long been interested in explaining the spatial distribution of economic activity, focusing on what factors motivate profit-maximizing firms when they choose to open a new plant or expand an existing facility. We begin our paper with a general discussion of the theory of plant...

The Pollution Abatement Costs and Expenditures (PACE) survey is the most comprehensive source of information on U.S. manufacturing’s capital expenditures and operating costs associated with pollution abatement. In 2003, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began a significant initiative to...

Invasive species are a growing threat in the United States, causing losses in biodiversity, changes in ecosystems, and impacts to economic enterprises such as agriculture, forestry, fisheries, power production, and international trade. The costs of preventing and controlling invasive species are...

In the environmental justice literature, evidence of disproportionate siting in poor or minority neighborhoods is decidedly mixed. Some allege this is due to the difference in whether the study looks at evidence at the national, state, or city level. Here, I compare results from two of the...

With tropical deforestation a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss, the land-use decisions of small-scale farmers at the forest margins have important implications for the global environment. Farmers’ incentives for maintaining forest fallow in a shifting...

This paper describes a bioeconomic model of a coastal recreational fishery that combines standard models of fish population dynamics, recreational catch, and recreation site choice. The population model estimates the influence of water quality on overall fish abundance through the effects of...

Rapid urbanization and increased industrialization have led to high pollution levels throughout Latin America. Economists tout policies based on market-based economic incentives as the most cost-effective methods for addressing a wide variety of environmental problems. This chapter examines...

We examine the incidence, form, and research consequences of measurement error in measures of fatal injury risk in U.S. workplaces using both BLS and NIOSH data. These data are commonly used in hedonic wage studies. Despite the fact that each of our measures of job risk purport to measure the...

We estimate individual discount rates with respect to time streams of money using controlled laboratory experiments. These discount rates are elicited by means of field experiments involving real monetary rewards. The experiments were carried out across Denmark using a representative sample of...