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...

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)...