This paper develops and applies an integrated model of human mortality and morbidity valuation that is consistent with principles of welfare economics. The standard expected utility model of one person facing two health states (alive and dead) is extended to a setting in which two family members...

Despite concerns about additionality, leakage, permanence, and verification, carbon offsets have been proposed as a core component of recent cap-and-trade proposals in order to contain costs, involve uncapped sectors in GHG reduction goals, and build mitigation capacity in developing countries....

It has often been stated that current studies aimed at understanding the magnitude of optimal climate policy fail to adequately capture the potential for “catastrophic” impacts of climate change. While economic modeling exercises to date do provide evidence that potential climate...

The effects of a carbon price on U.S. industries are likely to change over time as firms and customers gradually adjust to new prices. The effects will also depend on offsetting policies to compensate losers and the number of countries implementing comparable policies. We examine the effects of...

Many believe that environmental regulation must reduce employment, since regulations are expected to increase production costs, raising prices and reducing demand for output. A careful microeconomic analysis shows that this not guaranteed. Even if environmental regulation reduces output in the...

The management of non-native invasive species is a complex but crucial task given the potential for economic and environmental damages. For many invasions the development of socially optimal control strategies requires more than is offered by the single-species, single-control models that have...

Government agencies routinely use the “value of a statistical life” (VSL) in benefit-cost analyses of proposed environmental and safety regulations. Here I review an alternative approach for valuing health risks using a “life-cycle consumption framework.” This framework is based on an...

It has occasionally been asserted that regulators typically overestimate the costs of the regulations they impose. A number of arguments have been proposed for why this might be the case, with the most widely credited one being that regulators fail sufficiently to appreciate the effects of...

As atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations increase, the world’s oceans are absorbing CO2 at a faster rate than at any time in the past 800,000 years. While this reduces the amount of the most prevalent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere it also causes changes in seawater chemistry,...

Considerable interest has been expressed recently in prospects for water quality trading markets between nutrient sources in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. Allowing such flexibility in response to the terms of recently announced total maximum daily load (TMDL) restrictions might considerably...