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...

Since 1973, the Pollution Abatement Costs and Expenditures (PACE) survey has been the principle source of information on U.S. industries’ capital expenditure and operating costs associated with pollution abatement efforts. The PACE survey was discontinued after 1994 and then revived in 1999...

Using results from two contingent valuation surveys conducted in Canada and the U.S., we explore the effect of a latency period on willingness to pay (WTP) for reduced mortality risk using both structural and reduced form approaches. We find that delaying the time at which the risk reduction...

The framework for voluntary program evaluation assumes that voluntary programs provide partners with information that will not be transferred to non-partners. In this framework, a voluntary program is said to be worthwhile if there are significant differences between the behavior of partners and...

This paper provides a systematic overview of water quality trading in the U.S. The primary source of information for this overview is a detailed database, collected and compiled by a team of researchers at Dartmouth College. This paper divides the trading programs discussed in the database into...

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...