The environmental justice literature convincingly shows that poor people and minorities live in more polluted neighborhoods than do other groups. These findings have sparked a broad activist movement, numerous local lawsuits, and several federal policy reforms. Despite the importance of...

Over the past fifty years, economists have developed methods for estimating the public benefits of green spaces, allowing such information to be incorporated into land-use planning. But the extent to which it is ever used is unclear. This paper reviews the literature on public values for lands...

Traditional cross-sectional estimates of hedonic price functions theoretically can recover marginal willingness to pay for characteristics, but face endogeneity problems when some characteristics are unobserved. To help overcome such problems, economists have introduced difference-in-differences...

As economists took up the task of measuring the "demand" for environmental services not traded in markets, some chose to substituted survey-based methods known as contingent valuation (CV). Doing so, they could not help but find themselves in the uncomfortable position of self-evidently...

This paper explores the importance of continuity assumptions in hedonic price functions. Using a set of actual housing data to mimic a realistic city, and using a set of known preference orderings, it simulates a housing market to recover equilibrium prices. It then estimates price regressions...

Urban sprawl has become a policy concern of national prominence. One tool that has been suggested for combating sprawl is the land or split-rate tax. In theory, such taxes can raise the ratio of housing capital to land. This in turn can raise the density of housing units where it is applied, if...

Tiebout’s (1956) suggestion that people “vote with their feet” to find the community that provides their optimal bundle of taxes and public goods has played a central role in the theory of local public finance over the past 50 years. Given the central importance of Tiebout’s insights,...

This paper advocates consistently defined units of account to measure the contributions of nature to human welfare. We argue that such units have to date not been defined by environmental accounting advocates and that the term “ecosystem services” is too ad hoc to be of practical use in...