Over the past two decades, epidemiological studies have strengthened the link between air pollution and specific respiratory ailments, yielding better valuations for the pollution-related costs of illness and thus pinpointing the benefits of environmental regulations. Much work remains to be done, however, in linking air pollution to other important health outcomes, such as cancer, infant morta...

Careful attention to choice architecture promises to open up new possibilities for environmental protection — possibilities that may be more effective than the standard tools of economic incentives, mandates, and bans. How, for example, do consumers choose between environmentally friendly products or services and alternatives that are potentially damaging to the environment but less expensive? ...

Are fairness concerns of relevance to environmental economics and, if so, are they sufficiently structured to improve analysis in this field? On both of these questions, we answer in the affirmative, arguing that people’s fairness views are based on both general rules and the context, where context refers to the set of variables and persons employed to interpret and apply the principles. The fa...

We examine the incidence and extent of co-authorship and intellectual collaboration in the leading journal of environmental and resource economics: the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Previous studies of general economic journals have offered empirical evidence for the fact that intellectual collaboration is most prevalent in the field of environmental and resource economics....

We examine the distributional effects of changes in local air pollution from driving electric vehicles in the United States. We employ an econometric model to estimate power plant emissions and an integrated assessment model to value damages in air pollution from both electric and gasoline vehicles. Using the locations of currently registered electric vehicles, we find that people living in cen...

This paper briefly reviews key insights from natural resource and environmental economics, ecological economics and industrial ecology in an effort to identify the major contributions of these fields to the understanding and promotion of sustainable development. Each is based on overlapping worldviews, methods and tools. Their synthesis and extension– subsumed under the rubric of dNatural Econo...

1. Introduction The question of value has been central to economics since its inception as a scientific discipline. The Classical economists thought deeply about the distinction between use value and exchange value and the relationship between human happiness and the market prices of goods and services. With the development of marginal value theory, beginning in the 1870s, the value problem see...

In doing normative environmental economics economists usually use WTP figures for losses when WTA figures are correct. We puzzle over moral issues involved in using discount rates and worry about equity effect not normally considered in benefit cost analysis. We wonder if individuals who will never use an amenity should have their existence values counted and if so if then we should also count ...

and Environmental Economics, Inc. (E3), an economics and engineering consulting firm in San Francisco. He is now on leave from E3, teaching applied economics at the Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). With 30 years of experience in the electricity industry and over 100 refereed publications, he is an associate editor of Energy and a member of the editorial board of The Energy Journal. He holds...

In spite of the increasing concern on the role of technological change and innovation as a key factor of sustainability, environmental economics has paid little attention to the understanding of environmental innovation. Until recently, scholars working in environmental economics consider environmental innovation as induced by regulation. Within this perspective, one of the main research questi...