While large literatures have separately examined the history of the environmental movement, government planning, and modern economics, Pricing the Priceless triangulates on all three. Offering the first book-length study of the history of modern environmental economics, it uncovers the unlikely...

Urban sprawl has become a policy concern of national prominence. Land or split-rate taxes are one potential way to address this issue. In theory, such taxes can raise the capital/land ratio. This in turn can raise the density of housing units where it is applied, if the average quality/size of...

Perennial discontent with public education is a constant source of proposed reforms. One such reform is to break up large urban school districts, moving to a more efficient scale, increasing public school choices, and promoting school competition. This paper tests whether households expect these...

As economists increasingly embraced benefit-cost analysis during the middle decades of the 20th century, they faced several challenges. One challenge was to reconcile the tension between two visions, long existing side-by-side in the profession, for the place of the economist in policy analysis....

Like today, one hundred years ago air pollution was a matter of grave concern in the world's most polluted cities. In the wake of its famous 1908-9 social survey, the City of Pittsburgh commissioned an "Economic Survey of Pittsburgh" from John T. Holdsworth, a prominent institutional economist...

The transfer study, a technique used in cost-benefit analysis, is an increasingly important tool used by government agencies to assess environmental regulatory policy. This innovative book develops protocols for using the transfer method to approach environmental problems and introduces several...