Environmental and Resource Economics最新文献

Sustaining future generations requires cooperation today. While individuals’ selfish interests threaten to undermine cooperation, social institutions can foster cooperation in intergenerational situations without ambiguity. However, in numerous settings, from climate change to the biodiversity crisis, there exists considerable ambiguity in the degree of cooperation required. Such ambiguity limits the extent to which people typically cooperate. We present the results of an intergenerational public goods game, which show that a democratic institution can promote cooperation, even in the face of ambiguity. While ambiguity in previous work has proved a challenge to cooperation (although we find sometimes only small and non-significant effects of ambiguity), voting is consistently able to maintain sustainable group-level outcomes in our study. Additional analyses demonstrate that this form of democracy has an effect over and above the impact on beliefs alone and over and above the structural effects of the voting institution. Our results provide evidence that social institutions, such as democracy, can buffer against selfishness and sustain cooperation to provide time-delayed benefits to the future.

A key concern for property owners about the set up of proximate wind turbines is the potential devaluation of their property. However, there is no consensus in the empirical hedonic literature estimating this price-distance relationship. It remains unclear if the proximity to wind turbines reduces, increases, or has no significant effect on property values. This article addresses this ambiguity, combining 720 estimates from 25 hedonic pricing studies in a first comprehensive meta-analysis on this topic. Using Bayesian model averaging techniques and novel publication bias correction methods, I calculate an average of the reported estimates that is free from misspecification and publication bias. In economic terms, I find an average reduction in property values of (-0.68%) for properties 1.89 miles away, which turns to zero beyond 2.8 miles. Next to publication selection, the studies’ ability to control for confounding factors such as pre-existing price differentials and spatial effects explains the variance in reported effect sizes.

This study examines the effect of landfill scarcity on the cost of municipal solid waste (MSW) disposal. We find the evidence that a decrease in the remaining capacity of landfill sites increases the unit cost of waste disposal. We also find that landfill scarcity impacts intermediate disposal costs (the cost of MSW disposal methods other than landfill disposal) more than landfill disposal costs. Based on the results of previous studies that estimated the external costs of landfills, the cost reduction effect of having a landfill site may overwhelm the external costs. Our results demonstrate that having its own landfill site not only provides the final recipient of MSW but also reduces the cost of MSW disposal. The latter type of benefit has been overlooked in previous studies on MSW disposal.

Using daily variation in wind power generation in the western portion of Texas, we show that the resulting lower fossil fuel generation in the eastern portion of the state leads to air-quality improvements and, subsequently, to fewer emergency department (ED) visits. Spatially, the impact on pollution is widespread, but wind energy reduces ED admission rates more in zip codes closer to coal plants. Using intra-day wind generation and electricity pricing data, we find that more wind generation coming from hours when congestion on the electricity grid is less leads to higher reductions in emissions from east Texas power plants and PM2.5 concentrations and ED admission rates in east Texas. Comparing wind generation effects across low-demand night hours to higher-demand day hours, more NO(_text {X}) and SO(_2) is offset by wind from night hours, but the time-dependent effects for PM2.5 concentrations and ED admission rates is much weaker, potentially due to differences in exposure.

In this paper, we analyze how public monitoring and enforcement (M&E) efforts affect the success of a collective property right. We develop a bioeconomic model to generate several theoretical predictions, which we test empirically by assembling and analyzing novel data on public patrolling and fishing activity in the Chilean abalone fishery. Consistent with our model, we find robust evidence that patrolling increases abalone stocks and harvest for nearby fishers’ organizations. In our preferred (conservative) specifications, a 10% increase in patrolling increases stock density by 0.95% and harvest by 1.2%, which translates roughly to an increase in annual revenues of 6770 USD on average within a port captainship jurisdiction. Our work provides new empirical evidence on the determinants of success for collective property rights regimes, revealing the pivotal role that public M&E can play in helping sustain these institutions.

The coast plays a significant recreational role in the nine countries around the Baltic Sea. More than 70% of the population of these countries visit the coast, representing some 80 million recreational visits annually. Understanding the values associated with coastal recreation, and the potential welfare changes resulting from improvements in the state of environmental and infrastructure conditions of the Baltic Sea coast is important for marine environment management in the region. We estimate a spatially explicit travel cost model for Baltic coast recreation to assess the welfare of accessing individual sites, identify recreational hot spots and simulate the welfare changes resulting from improvements in environmental and infrastructure conditions. The total benefits associated with Baltic Sea coast-based recreation amount to 27.5 billion EUR per year with significant variation across sites. Improving water quality and infrastructure boost the recreational value by nearly 6.2 billion EUR, an increase of about a fifth of the existing recreational benefits.

We combine a multi-country household panel dataset with high-resolution gridded precipitation data to investigate how cumulative climatic shocks affects the decision to leave the households in five sub-Saharan African countries. We find that while the effect of recent adverse weather shocks is on average modest, the cumulative effect of a persistent exposure to droughts over several years leads to a significant increase in the probability for a household member to leave the household. We speculate that this pattern can be indicative of increased migratory flows due to increase in the frequency of extremes.

We formally model a Cournot duopoly market in which a corporate socially responsible (CSR) firm interacts with a profit-maximizing firm and where the market is regulated with an emission tax. We consider three different kinds of CSR firm behaviors: (i) consumer-friendly; (ii) environmentally-friendly; and (iii) consumer-environmentally friendly. Unlike most theoretical works within this literature, which typically use specific functional forms, we use general structures for the inverse demand function, the cost function, and for emission levels and damage functions. In terms of modeling strategy, we use two game-theoretic approaches: (i) a simultaneous game and (ii) a sequential three-stage ex-post game, in which decisions are time consistent. We found that the optimal emissions taxation rule is modified when considering different CSR motivations. We show that depending upon the CSR motivation and the price elasticity of demand in some cases we can obtain optimal emission tax rates higher, lower, or equal to marginal external emission. Finally, we also found that firms adopting consumer-friendly CSR behavior are more effective in improving the environment compared to environmentally friendly firms.