Many communities are concerned about the reuse of potentially contaminated land ("brownfields") and believe that environmental liability is a hindrance to redevelopment. However, with land price adjustments, liability might not impede the reuse of this land. Existing literature has found price reductions in response to liability, but few studies have looked for an effect on vacancies. This pape...

Many biodiversity researchers have responded to the financial constraints faced by policy makers to develop models based upon the “Noah’s Ark” metaphor, implying that society can save only a limited amount of biodiversity. Unfortunately, as Herman Daly (Land Economics, 1991) pointed out, such microeconomic rules can allow an ark to sink albeit in some optimal fashion. So, I step back to look at...

Soil health plays an important role in agricultural productivity, environmental resiliency, and ecosystem sustainability. However, this hard-to-quantify holistic concept has proven di cult to incorporate into existing economic and policy frameworks. This report summarizes existing knowledge about the economics of soil health, suggests a methodology for studying the economics of soil health, ide...

In this paper we investigate the household demand for childcare during lunchtime at school using a stated preferences approach. Data are collected through phone-structured interviews to 905 residents with children in the German-speaking region of Switzerland during 2007. Poisson models with random and …xed e¤ects are used to explore factors a¤ecting the demand. Ordinal probit models are also co...

This study presents an overview of modern field experiments and their usage in economics. Our discussion focuses on three distinct periods of field experimentation that have influenced the economics literature. The first might well be thought of as the dawn of "field" experimentation: the work of Neyman and Fisher, who laid the experimental foundation in the 1920s and 1930s by conceptualizing r...

Zipf’s Law characterizes city populations as obeying a distributional power law and is supposedly one of the most robust regularities in all of economics. This paper shows, to the contrary, that Zipf’s Law only emerged in Europe between 1500 and 1800. It documents how Zipf’s Law emerged with the development of markets in the centuries preceding the onset of modern economic growth. It shows that...

Interim Reports on work of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis receive only limited review. Views or opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent those of the Institute, its National Member Organizations, or other organizations supporting the work. Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 The basic model and its assumptions 3 2.1 Scenario-analysis within a structural economics...

a r t i c l e i n f o JEL classification: R14 R52 Keywords: R14 Land use patterns R52 Land use and other regulations This paper expands empirical testing of the predictions of the standard monocentric urban model to examine the size of urban spatial expansion for all US metropolitan regions for the years 1980, 1990 and 2000. Until recently, the lack of temporally and spatially-consistently inte...

Urban development is a complex process influenced by a number of driving forces, including spatial planning, topography and urban economics. Identifying these drivers is crucial for the regulation of urban development and the calibration of predictive models. Existing land-use models generally consider urban development as a binary process, through the identification of built versus non-built a...