Willingness to pay for quality change may depend on heterogeneous perceived quality levels. In these instances, contingent valuation studies should include measures of quality perceptions as covariates in the willingness to pay model in order to avoid omitted variable bias. Variation in quality...

In this paper we examine the allocation of environmental regulatory effort across U.S. pulp and paper mills, looking at measures of regulatory activity (inspections and enforcement actions) and levels of air and water pollution from those mills. We combine measures of the marginal benefits of...

In this paper we estimate the price premium associated with organic baby food by applying a hedonic model to price and characteristic data for baby food products collected in two cities: Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina and San Jose, California. We use price per jar of baby food as the dependent...

Studies that estimate the benefits of reduced environmental exposure typically assume that individuals know the true magnitude of the risk reduction. However, the accuracy of risk perception assumptions may be questionable. This issue has not been resolved with respect to adult risk reductions...

Appropriate characterization and valuation of the health risks specific to children is important for effective environmental health risk management. This paper highlights the typical information provided by risk analysts about risks to children and the information needs of economic analysts....

Although studies suggest that air pollution is linked to perinatal outcomes, the geographic characterization of exposure to pollution differs between the studies. Thus, we compared neighborhood and county-level measures of air pollution exposure, while examining the association between...

The only comprehensive source of the actual costs of environmental abatement activities in the United States has been the Pollution Abatement Costs and Expenditures (PACE) survey. This survey collects facility-level data on capital and operating costs of pollution abatement, focusing on...

The Clean Air Act of 1990 initiated a tradable permit program for emissions of sulfur dioxide from coal-fired power plants. The effect of this enlightened policy on the coal industry was a large increase in consumption of low-sulfur bituminous and subbituminous coals. Low-sulfur bituminous coal...

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...

This study examines the determinants of environmental and economic performance for plants in three traditional smoke-stack industries: pulp and paper, oil, and steel. We combine data from Census Bureau and EPA databases and Compustat on the economic performance, regulatory activity and...