This paper provides a review of the science pertaining to all aspects of acidification in the Adirondack Park, updating an earlier review of the science (Cook et al. 2002). The review supports an ongoing social science investigation into the willingness to pay for ecological improvements that...

This paper analyses how the properties of locational equilibrium models can be used to evaluate approaches for constructing price indexes for heterogeneous houses. Housing markets play a key role in locational equilibrium models. Prices for houses determine that implicit costs that households...

This paper traces the history of the "Value of Statistical Life" (VSL), which today is used routinely in benefit-cost analysis of life-saving investments. Schelling (1968) made the crucial move of thinking in terms of risk rather than individual lives, with the hope to dodge the moral thicket of...

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...

Environmentalism in the United States historically has been divided into its utilitarian and preservationist impulses, represented by Gifford Pinchot and John Muir, respectively. Pinchot advocated conservation of natural resources to be used for human purposes; Muir advocated protection from...

Traditional cross-sectional estimates of hedonic price functions can recover marginal willingness to pay for characteristics, but face endogeneity problems for estimating non-marginal welfare measures. I show that when panel data on household demands are available, one can construct a...

Analyses of policies to reduce gasoline consumption have focused on two effects, a compositional effect on the fuel economy of the automotive fleet and a utilization effect on how much people drive. However, the literature has missed a third effect: a matching effect, in which the policy changes...

Environmentalism in the United States historically has been divided into its utilitarian and preservationist impulses, represented by Gifford Pinchot and John Muir, respectively. Pinchot advocated conservation of natural resources to be used for human purposes; Muir advocated protection from...

Understanding the spatial variation in housing prices plays a crucial role in topics ranging from the cost of living to quality-of-life indices to studies of public goods and household mobility. Yet analysts have not reached a consensus on the best source of such data, variously using...

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, there have...