The water quality index (WQI) has emerged as a central way to convey water quality information to policy makers and the general public and is regularly used in US EPA regulatory impact analysis. It is a compound indicator that aggregates information from several water quality parameters. Several...

Under current trends, municipal demand for water in Oregon's Willamette River Basin will double by 2050. Municipalities will have to develop new sources of water, in competition with agricultural and other established uses, as well as increased demand for water to support ecological values....

If, as argued elsewhere, geoengineering represents the most efficient and effective first step towards a solution of the global climate change problem, it is important to analyze how such a geoengineering effort might best be organized. A number of possible organizations are discussed and...

This paper examines whether a firm's allocation of production across its plants responds to the environmental regulation faced by those plants, as measured by differences in stringency across states. We also test whether sensitivity to regulation differs based on differences across firms in...

Some recent research suggests that uncertainty about the response of the climate system to atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations can have a disproportionately large influence on benefits estimates for climate change policies, potentially even dominating the effect of the discount rate....

The purpose of this review is to survey the literature addressing the employment effects of brownfield redevelopment. Economic development has emerged as a potential goal of the environmental cleanup process. The evolving literature (1) addresses the redevelopment and job creation that has...

The hemlock woolly adelgid is an invasive insect that is infesting and destroying hemlock forests in the northeastern United States. Mitigation efforts are taking place on public lands throughout the affected area. This study examines one such effort in the southern Appalachian Mountains....

Preference calibration has been proposed as a method for improving benefit transfers (Smith et al., 2002). The objective of this method is to develop a WTP function that can be used to predict individuals’ values for a wide range of quality changes. The analyst’s specification of preferences...

Policies aimed at conserving energy support energy independence, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and benefit consumers. In contrast, support for corn ethanol production raises world commodity prices and pressures the land and water base, as occurred in the U.S. during the plow-out of the...

In this paper we investigate the impact of environmental regulation on productivity using a Cobb-Douglas production function framework. Estimating the effects of regulation on productivity can be done with a top-down approach using data for broad sectors of the economy, or a more disaggregated...