The standard theory that the first-best tax on pollution is equal to marginal environmental damages has been extended in two directions. First, many polluting activities are difficult to tax because they are not market transactions, and so recent papers have shown that the same effects can be...

This paper discusses indirect child welfare effects associated with environmental health. It considers the economic value of reducing the indirect risk to a child’s life chances from environmental threats to (a) caregiver health, (b) sibling health or the child’s health, and (c) the health...

One of the many difficult issues the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Children’s Health Protection is addressing is the appropriate treatment of children’s health effects in the economic analyses performed by the Agency. Policy analysis efforts at the Agency often rely on the...

Standard economic models of groundwater management assume perfect transmissivity (i.e., the aquifer behaves as a bathtub), no external effects of groundwater stocks, and/or homogenous agents. In this article, we develop a model relaxing these assumptions. Although our model generalizes to an...

This paper examines factors that may influence the estimates of the Value of a Statistical Life obtained from contingent valuation surveys that elicit the willingness to pay (WTP) for mortality risk reductions. We examine the importance of distributional assumptions, the choice of the welfare...

The Pollution Abatement Costs and Expenditures (PACE) survey is the only comprehensive source of pollution abatement costs and expenditures related to environmental protection in the manufacturing sector of the United States. The PACE survey was conducted annually from 1973 to 1994, with the...

Total pollution emitted by U.S. manufacturers declined over the past 30 years by about 60 percent, even though real manufacturing output increased 70 percent. This improvement must result from a combination of two trends: (1) changes in production or abatement processes ("technology"); or (2)...

Strong local opposition to the construction of solid waste landfills has become commonplace and the siting of landfills in the United States is time consuming and expensive. To ease the siting process, host compensation in exchange for permission to construct a landfill has become popular. The...

Small firms are an important part of any economy, since they generate a large proportion of an economy's new jobs. Despite their apparent vitality, though, small firms are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of government regulation. Analyzing the impact of regulation on small firms...

Given the increased focus on reuse activity within EPA and state site cleanup programs, policy makers would benefit from looking across programs to better understand the extent and nature of reuse; examine site characteristics that influence reuse; leverage lessons learned; and coordinate reuse...