The Value of a Statistical Life is a key input into the calculation of the benefits of environmental policies that save lives. To date, the VSL used in environmental policy analyses has not been adjusted for age or the cause of death. Air pollution regulations, however, are linked to reductions...

The field of Health Impact Assessment is relatively new to the United States, but already a number of state and local governments are incorporating these assessments into land use planning and decision making. In five years, the use of HIA in the U.S. has increased dramatically with more than...

Professor William Rodgers is one of the handful of legal academics who have shaped and influenced environmental law since it was created out of whole cloth in the late 1960s. The staggering quantity, quality, breadth, and creativity of his scholarship are perhaps unrivaled among his peers. It is...

Our land use control system operates across a variety of multidimensional and dynamic categories. Learning to navigate within and between these categories requires an appreciation for their interconnected, dynamic, and textured components and an awareness of alternative mechanisms for achieving...

This paper updates the mortality cost of expenditures. Because changes in income lead to changes in mortality risk, regulatory expenditures costing more per life saved than a threshold cost-per-life saved cutoff level are expected to increase mortality risk. This article discusses the mechanisms...

The net effect of policies to reduce harm to potential victims is sometimes much smaller than the predicted effect because of failure to account for victim offsetting behavior (OB). A simple expected accident loss model is developed where one parameter, the coefficient of diminishing returns,...

Economics provides tools to value the environment and impacts to it. The environment produces goods and services that contribute to the wellbeing and utility of humans. Human actions that adversely impact on the environment change the flow of goods and services and utility of humans. Economic...

This chapter provides an economic perspective of environmental law and policy. We examine the ends of environmental policy, that is, the setting of goals and targets, beginning with normative issues, notably the Kaldor–Hicks criterion and the related method of assessment known as...

This is a substantially revised, refocused, and updated version of an earlier draft paper, exploring the significant role Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) plays in facilitating or impeding legislative and regulatory policy decisions. The paper centers around three case studies of CBAs EPA prepared...

A heated debate has emerged among legal academics over the continued appropriateness of using cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as a decisionmaking tool in federal administrative agencies. Environmentalists and other progressive thinkers argue that regulators should abandon CBA in favor of more...