This article provides an introduction to the symposium on best practices for using revealed preference methods for nonmarket valuation. Nonmarket valuation is an essential tool in the benefit–cost analysis (BCA) of environmental goods and services. Here, we identify the role of BCA in several key U.S. Executive Orders, U.K. appraisals, and European Union Directives that inform decision-making concerning

Public lands can provide a wide range of environmental benefits. Granting protective status to these lands generally imposes restrictions on resource development and extraction activities and thus often generates conflict and debate among public and private stakeholders. In the United States, this is especially the case for national monuments, which are areas that contain significant historic, prehistoric

The hedonic property-value model has been refined over more than forty years to become one of the premier approaches to valuing environmental amenities. This article presents best practices for hedonic property-value modeling when the goal is to measure households’ willingness to pay (WTP) for a change in a spatially varying amenity. The starting point is a research design that identifies a source

This article discusses best practices for implementing recreation demand models. We focus on insights that research and experience provide for the typical recreation application, where the analyst uses individual-level data to measure the value of changes in recreation site access or quality at one or more destinations. We examine issues related to data collection, pre-analysis tasks, modeling, and

Environmental and resource economists pride themselves on the credibility of their empirical research. In other disciplines, however, the credibility of empirical research is increasingly being debated by scholars. At the core of these debates are critiques of widespread practices, such as selectively reporting results or using designs with low statistical power, and critiques of the professional incentives

For the last four decades, benefit–cost analysis has been a mainstay of the U.S. federal regulatory process and, under Executive Orders in effect since 1981, such analysis must generally be used to justify significant federal regulations. While administrations of different parties have occasionally differed on the methodologies used to assess costs or benefits, these disagreements operated within the

The hedonic wage model provides a key input into benefit–cost analyses of public policies that are aimed at reducing mortality risks: an estimate of the value of reduced mortality risk (VRMR), also known as the value of a statistical life. Because a large majority of the benefits associated with policies that improve air quality stem from mortality risk reductions, estimates of the VRMR play an exceptionally

The health of many marine, coastal, freshwater, and other aquatic ecosystems is inextricably linked to decisions about the management of water quality and quantity. In this article we review the economic literature aimed at quantifying the impacts of water resource management on aquatic species in the United States and the potential welfare gains of managing water and aquatic species systems jointly

Nutrient pollution is one of the leading causes of declines in surface water quality both in the United States and globally. This article discusses three important issues that influence the effectiveness of recent U.S. policies that ban the use of phosphates in household and commercial products and, ultimately, these policies’ ability to improve water quality. First, the U.S. production of phosphates

Policies to address environmental and natural resource management are often implemented at the group level. The defining feature of such policies is that penalties or rewards are based on group rather than individual performance, or rights are allocated to a group rather than to individuals. This article discusses how group-level policies have been applied and studied across a variety of contexts in

Farming accounts for approximately 70 percent of freshwater withdrawals worldwide, and it often constitutes the lowest value use of freshwater. Where water is scarce, advanced irrigation technologies such as drip and piped delivery systems have been promoted as “water conservation technologies” (WCTs) that reduce agricultural water consumption, thus releasing water to alternative uses (e.g., the environment)

The Trump administration’s August 2018 proposed rollback of the 2020–2026 fuel economy standards has been the subject of great controversy in the policy community. The justification for the rollback was based on an analysis indicating that the previous fuel economy standards would be associated with more than 12,000 additional fatalities over the lifetime of the vehicles affected by the standards.

There has been growing interest in using satellite data in environmental economics research. This is because satellite data are available for any region across the globe, provide frequent data over time, are becoming available at lower cost, and are becoming easier to process. While satellite data have the potential to be a powerful resource, these data have their own sources of biases and error, which

The design of climate change policy must address a number of key uncertainties, including the impacts of climate change, the economics of a carbon tax, and the global effort to combat climate change. A periodic review of each of these issues would provide new information and analysis that could be used to reduce uncertainty and inform the updating of a carbon tax over time. This article proposes and

While market-based climate policy in the United States has been dominated by emissions trading, including policies at the state level and in proposed major federal legislation, a number of recent U.S. climate proposals focus on a carbon tax (or fee). Just as emissions trading programs have included some form of “price containment” measures, carbon tax policies may include “emissions assurance” provisions

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering a new policy that would prohibit the agency from issuing regulations that rely on studies whose underlying data are not publicly available. While the EPA claims it is pursuing this policy in the interest of transparency, we argue that such a prohibition would greatly hinder, rather than help, the rulemaking process and would likely result

This article reviews methods that use historical data on weather, climate, economic activity, and other variables to statistically measure the effect of climate on economic outcomes. This has been an active area of research for several decades, with many recent developments and discussions in the literature concerning the best way to estimate climate damages. The article first presents a conceptual

Economists have long favored a carbon tax as the most efficient policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions. One barrier to broader support for this policy option is its failure to ensure limits on emissions. Environmental groups, in particular, have expressed skepticism about carbon taxes for this failure to explicitly limit emissions. In response, policymakers have shown interest in a hybrid carbon tax

Public discussions of environmentally motivated policies include much confusing talk about job loss. Does job loss in a polluting industry mean that others should endure dirty air or that complementary policies are needed? To clarify the jobs issue, I use concepts from research on international trade policy and its effects and apply them to recent job loss in the U.S. coal industry. The case of coal

There is increasing political interest in the United States in an economy-wide carbon tax. However, many environmental groups see the emissions uncertainty under a carbon tax as a significant shortcoming, leaving them reluctant to support carbon taxes without some assurance about emissions outcomes. This has created an interest in options for reducing a carbon tax’s inherent emissions uncertainty.

Building on recent consensus findings from climate scientists, this article argues that stronger policy action to address global climate change is urgent. The article indicates how economists can better address this urgency and thereby contribute more effectively to climate policy discussions. Greater effectiveness requires that economists focus their policy assessments more sharply on the timing of

Recent advancements in the availability of models and data to characterize the economic impacts of climate change have improved our ability to project both the physical impacts and economic effects of climate change across economic sectors of the United States. These advancements have in turn provided an opportunity to estimate these impacts across multiple economic sectors using a consistent set of

Climate change is a global externality that has proven difficult to address through formal institutions alone due to the public good properties of climate change mitigation and the lack of a supranational institution for enforcing global treaties. Given these circumstances, which are arguably the most challenging for international cooperation, commitment problems and free-riding incentives for countries

Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has made significant changes to the way it conducts economic analyses of regulatory actions. Changes in the assumptions and methods used in regulatory impact analyses (RIAs) have produced fundamentally different conclusions about the economic benefits and costs of significant regulations. At the same time, the EPA has eliminated

In order to support the use of economics in environmental management, revealed preference studies continue to advance the measurement of environmental values. Together with integrated assessment models, these values are ever more useful for environmental management. This article briefly reviews revealed preference methods, which infer values from observed behavior. A new emphasis in this literature

In this article I review and discuss the use of stated and revealed preference methods in two contexts: the estimation of the value per statistical life (VSL) and the “energy efficiency gap,” namely the slow pace of adoption of energy efficient technologies, even when they make economic sense. I examine whether revealed preference and stated preference studies complement one another in answering basic

This article reviews the literature on the conservation and livelihood impacts of recent policy and institutional reforms concerning the management of common pool natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa. The evidence suggests that the specific institutional and natural resource context is critical to the success or failure of reforms. We also identify several methodological and data deficiencies in

Migration is one response to climatic stress and shocks. In this article we review the recent literature across various disciplines on the effects of climate change on migration. We explore key features of the relationship between climate change and migration, distinguishing between fast-onset and slow-onset climatic events and examining the causes of heterogeneity in migratory responses to climate

Economic losses from natural disasters have been increasing in recent decades. This has been attributed mainly to population and economic growth in disaster-prone areas. Future natural disaster losses are expected to increase due to a continued increase in economic exposure and climate change. This highlights the importance of designing policies that can mitigate the impacts of these disasters on the

This article examines the role of stated preference (SP) valuation methods in the environmental economist’s toolbox. Overall, the article makes the case for using SP methods in a wide range of settings, showing how the approach can be used to both inform policy and gain a better understanding of people’s choices and preferences. First, we provide an overview of SP methods and discuss a number of policy

This Editorial, written by a former United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator under President Barack Obama, is adapted from the author's keynote address on June 25, 2018 at the World Congress of Environment