This study proposes new family-centered measures of access to early care and education (ECE) services with respect to quantity, cost, and quality and uses them to assess disparities in access across locations and socio-demographic groups in Minnesota. These measures are distance-based and use...

The paper argues that access to public infrastructure plays a crucial role on the presence of private schools in a community, as it could not only minimise the cost of production, but also ensure a high return to private investment. Results using community, school and child/household-level PROBE...

We analyze the role of distance from a university in the decision to attend higher education in Germany. Students who live near a university can avoid moving and the increased living expenses by commuting. Thus, transaction cost arguments would suggest that the greater the distance to the...

This paper estimates the monetary value of cutting PM2.5, a dominant source of air pollution in China. By matching hedonic happiness in a nationally representative survey with daily air quality data according to exact dates and locations of interviews in China, we are able to estimate the...

Why do damages from changes in environmental quality differ across and within countries? Causal investigation of this question has been challenging because differences may stem from heterogeneity in cumulative exposure or differences in socioeconomic factors such as income. We revisit the...

In many countries environmental policies and regulations are implemented to improve environmental quality and thus individuals' well-being. However, how do individuals value the environment? In this paper, we review the Life Satisfaction Approach (LSA) representing a new non-market valuation...

The transition process in Central and Eastern Europe was associated with growing environmental awareness. This paper analyses the determinants of Pollution Abatement and Control Expenditure (PACE) at plant level in the case of Romania using survey data and a Multilevel Regression Model (MRM)....

Using modern methods for analyzing multi-level data, we find that, by and large, citizens of OECD countries are more satisfied with the way democracy works in their country if more environmental policies are in place and if environmental quality is higher. We also document that parents care...

Do environmental conditions pose greater health risks to individuals living in urban or rural areas? The answer is theoretically ambiguous: while urban areas have traditionally been associated with heightened exposure to environmental pollutants, the economies of scale and density inherent to...

Following market liberalisation, the vehicle population in China has increased dramatically over the past few decades. This paper examines the causal impact of the opening of a heavily used high speed rail line connecting two megacities in China in 2015, Chengdu and Chongqing, on air pollution....