This paper e.vatnines whether a severe flood causes homeowners to update their assessment of ßood risk as seen in a change in the price of fhodphtin property. I use data on all single-family. residential property sales in St, Louis County. Missouri, hetweeti 1979 and 2006 in a repeat-sales model and a property fixed-effects model. After the ¡993 ßood on the Mi.ssouri and Mississippi rivers, pro...

Respondents reported willingness to pay (WTP) for mitigating carbon dioxide emissions after structured group discussion or without this deliberation. Deliberation did not affect mean or median WTP, but it increased the number of issues respondents considered, with some issues becoming more frequently considered and others less. Surveyonly respondents considered issues relevant for responding to...

The Truckee / Carson / Walker River Watershed in Northern Nevada is under an imminent threat of infestation by the New Zealand Mud Snail, an aquatic nuisance species with the potential to harm recreational fisheries. We combine a utility-theoretic system-demand model of recreational angling with a Bayesian econometric framework to provide estimates of trip and welfare losses under different typ...

This paper measures the economic impact of climate change on US agricultural land by estimating the effect of random year-to-year variation in temperature and precipitation on agricultural profits. The preferred estimates indicate that climate change will increase annual profits by $1.3 billion in 2002 dollars (2002$) or 4 percent. This estimate is robust to numerous specification checks and re...

A theoretical framework is presented to explain how agents respond to information under uncertainty in contingent valuation surveys. Agents are provided with information signals and referendum prices as part of the elicitation process. Agents use Bayesian updating to revise prior distributions. An information prompt is presented to reduce hypothetical bias. However, we show the interaction betw...

The largest decile of commercial electricity customers comprises half of commercial sector electricity usage. We quantify a substantial split incentives problem that exists when these large rms are on electricity-included property lease contracts. Using exogenous variation in weather shocks, we show that customers on tenant-paid contracts use 6-14% less electricity in summer months. The policy ...

This paper explores the criterion validity of stated preference methods through experimental referenda that capture key characteristics of a stated preference survey for a proposed environmental program. In particular, we investigate whether advisory referenda, where participant votes have either known or unknown weight in the policy decision, can elicit values comparable to that of a standard,...

Taking advantage of the structure of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA), we study the tradeoff between efficiency and equity associated with different levels of discretionary power when delegating regulatory authority to lower levels of government. Exploiting an instrumental variables approach, we provide evidence that the benefits of the 1990 CAAA were highly localized and accrued dispro...

We consider the joint effect of profit and Pigouvian taxation in a model of imperfect competition. We show that, when both profit taxation and Pigouvian taxation/subsidy are used, the former is no longer neutral. The two fiscal tools are substitutes, and for any profit taxation rate there exists a unique Pigouvian tax that entails the first best outcome as an equilibrium. Our analysis therefore...

Climate change not only impacts production and market consumption but also the relative scarcity of nonmarket goods, such as environmental amenities. We study fundamental drivers resulting price changes, their potential magnitude, implications for climate policy in Nordhaus’s Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model, thereby addressing one its key criticisms. propose plausible ranges the...