Policy-makers and others interested in environmental justice (EJ) are concerned that poor and minority communities are disproportionately exposed to pollution. Title IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments required the dirtiest coal-fired utilities to cap their SO2 emissions at 5.8 million tons...

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...

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...

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...

This paper develops methods for evaluating distributional impacts of alternative environmental policies across demographic groups. The income inequality literature provides a natural methodological toolbox for comparing distributions of environmental outcomes. We show that the most commonly used...

Economists have long been interested in measuring distributional impacts of policy interventions. As environmental justice (EJ) emerged as an ethical issue in the 1970s, the academic literature has provided statistical analyses of the incidence and causes of various environmental outcomes as...

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 analyzes border protection policies for managing risk of unintended imports of invasive species. Previous work typically assumes invasive species risk to be exogenous and commonly known. Here, we examine cases in which endogenous actions (exporter abatement) affect risk and allow for...

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...

The EPA has a cornucopia of cleanup and reuse programs ranging from the Superfund Program which addresses sites posing imminent danger and many of the most hazardous sites nationwide, to the Brownfields Program which addresses lower risk sites. These programs provide a common set of primary...