the housing market impacts of shale gas development using data from pennsylvania and an array of empirical techniques to control for confounding factors we recover hedonic estimates of property value impacts from nearby shale gas development that vary with water source well productivity and visibility results indicate large negative impacts on nearby groundwater dependent homes while piped water dependent homes exhibit smaller positive impacts suggesting benefits from lease payments results have implications for the debate over regulation of shale gas development jel l71 q35 q53 r31 technological improvements in the extraction of oil and natural gas from unconventional sources have transformed communities and landscapes and brought debate and controversy in the policy arena shale gas plays underlying the populated northeastern united states were thought to be uneconomical less than ten years ago but now contribute a major share of us gas supply 1 natural gas has been hailed as a bridge to energy independence and a clean future because of its domestic sourcing and compared with coal and petroleum derivatives its smaller carbon footprint and reduced emissions of other pollutants e g particulates sulfur dioxide car

the market value of reducing cancer risk hedonic housing prices with changing information 1 introduction market evidence on the value of a statistical life invariably consists of cross sectional evidence on risks and prices or wages at a point in time if information about the level of risk changes over time and people incorporate this information in a rational manner there will be a corresponding price response on the basis of these temporal changes one can estimate the market price risk tradeoff eliminating many confounding time invariant effects that cannot be controlled for using cross sectional data this paper examines the market response to the release of government information about the level of risk at hazardous waste sites and provides insight into the rationality of this response studies based on experimental evidence and survey data often find that individual beliefs may deviate from objective risk levels 1 people often overestimate highly publicized risks and mortality risks in the case of hazardous waste risks bias in risk beliefs often leads to considerable public reaction and pressure for site cleanups which may be an inefficient outcome by using market data one can examine whether this intense public reaction carries over to contexts in which private money is at stake government agencies frequently use information provision as a regulatory device particularly since the advent of the right to know movement of the 1980s examples of information provision efforts include the food and drug administration s requirement that many prescription drugs indude information inserts the department of housing and urban development s requirement that sellers of houses built before 1950 inform buyers about the presence of lead based paints and the environmental protection agency s epa requirement that manufacturing facilities report their annual releases of chemicals above a threshold amount for a list of over 600 substances such regulations imply a belief that citizens can learn from information about risk and rationally adjust their prior beliefs towards the objective risk level in light of the information this article provides market evidence to bolster the results of some survey studies of information transfer that suggest that individuals revise their risk beliefs in response to new information 2 the u s federal policy dealing with hazardous waste sites is known as the superfund program the most hazardous sites are targeted for cleanup and placed on a government priority roster called the national priorities list npl extension of the classic theory of compensating differentials to the housing market implies that environmental disamenities such as hazardous waste sites will reduce housing prices rosen 1974 the negative impact of hazardous waste sites on the housing prices of nearby residences is well documented for example in a previous study gayer hamilton and viscusi 2000 we used an analysis that focused on the sale of 16 928 houses from 1988 to 1993 that surround superfund sites in greater grand rapids michigan we found that before the epa released its risk report a reduction in the cancer risk from neighborhood superfund sites by the mean level of risk would increase the average value of a house by 238 in 1996 dollars 3 to estimate this willingness of residents to pay to avoid cancer risks before the release of the epa s risk report we assumed that residents prior beliefs were equal to the objectively measured risks suggested by the report thus this analysis was based on the very strong informational assumption that residents could in effect predict the results of the epa s site specific risk assessments before the release of the report the price risk tradeoff implied a value of a statistical cancer case of 51 million once the epa released its risk information the implied value of a statistical cancer case was 4 million these results suggest that after the release of the epa s risk report revealed preferences for avoiding superfund risks were consistent with surveys of the value of a statistical life in the labor market

do better schools matter parental valuation of elementary education the evaluation of numerous school reforms requires an understanding of the value of better schools given the difficulty of calculating the relationship between school quality and student outcomes i turn to another method and use house prices to infer the value parents place on school quality i look within school districts at houses located on attendance district boundaries houses then differ only by the elementary school the child attends i thereby effectively remove the variation in neighborhoods taxes and school spending i find that parents are willing to pay 2 5 percent more for a 5 percent increase in test scores this finding is robust to a number of sensitivity checks

private values of risk tradeoffs at superfund sites housing market evidence on learning about risk this paper incorporates a bayesian learning model into a hedonic framework to estimate the value that residents place on avoiding cancer risks from hazardous waste sites we show that residents are

estimating the value of a statistical life the importance of omitted variables and publication bias measures of public preferences toward risk are critical to evaluations of public policies on many safety environmental and health issues in this paper we provide a method for measuring the revealed preferences for safety risks from state level public choices about speed limits the idea is to measure the value of the time saved per incremental fatality that results from the voluntary adoption of an increased speed limit since adopters must have valued the time saved by greater speeds more than the fatalities created this ratio provides a convincing and credible upper bound on the value of a statistical life vsl

valuing nuclear energy risk evidence from the impact of the fukushima crisis on u s house prices abstract behavioral economics suggests that individuals overweight recent unexpected and or rare events when updating beliefs this study investigates the effect of such an event the fukushima nuclear crisis in 2011 on the learning process of a local environmental risk by evaluating how perceptions of the risk of a nuclear accident are capitalized into house prices near nuclear power plants npps in the u s our results provide new evidence on the dynamics of the effect spatially the impact was concentrated in a 4 km radius around npps and temporally it peaked a half year later and dissipated one year after the crisis

valuing the reliability of the electrical power infrastructure a two stage hedonic approach the reliability of electrical power supply is amongst the conditions that inform house purchase decisions in all urban areas reliability depends in part on the conditions of the power generation and distribution infrastructures involved and in part on environmental conditions its value to homeowners may be capitalised into the value of the house in this paper a hedonic pricing approach is used to estimate the capitalised value of the reliability offered by distribution infrastructures and the environmental conditions with which they interact in phoenix arizona a first stage estimates the impact of infrastructure and environmental conditions on reliability in a second stage the capitalised value of reliability from the marginal willingness to pay for reliability revealed by house purchase decisions is estimated and used to infer the value of both infrastructural characteristics and environmental conditions

the estimation of demand parameters in hedonic price models this paper shows that the econometric problem of estimating hedonic demand parameters is not a standard identification problem caused by demand supply interaction as has been often assumed estimation procedures based on this assumption lead to biased results the hedonic estimation problem is instead caused by the endogeneity of both prices and quantities when households face a nonlinear budget constraint an instrumental variables solution to this problem is suggested using instruments that exogenously shift the budget constraint

estimating the marginal willingness to pay function without instrumental variables abstract the hedonic model of rosen 1974 has become a workhorse for valuing the characteristics of differentiated products despite a number of well documented econometric problems including a source of endogeneity that has proven difficult to overcome here we outline a simple likelihood based estimation approach for recovering the marginal willingness to pay function that avoids this endogeneity problem using this framework we find that marginal willingness to pay to avoid violent crime increases by sixteen cents with each additional incident per 100 000 residents accounting for the slope of the marginal willingness to pay function has significant impacts on welfare analyses

quasi experimental evidence on the effect of aircraft noise on apartment rents inferring the implicit price of an environmental good hinges on ceteris paribus conditions that are often hard to justify this paper uses an unexpected change in flight regulations as source of exogenous variation and identifies aircraft noise effects from price adjustments in the market for rental apartments controlling for spatial and apartment heterogeneity we find that aircraft noise reduces apartment rents by about 0 5 per decibel our results indicate i that noise discounts are overestimated in cross sectional studies because aircraft noise tends to be negatively correlated with omitted neighborhood and housing amenities and ii that noise effects are unlikely to be constant over the entire noise range

the economic impacts of climate change evidence from agricultural output and random fluctuations in weather fisher et al 2012 hereafter fhrs have uncovered coding and data errors in our paper deschenes and greenstone 2007 hereafter dg we acknowledge and are embarrassed by these mistakes we are grateful to fhrs for uncovering them we hope that this reply will also contribute to advancing the literature on the vital question of the impact of climate change on the us agricultural sector fhrs main critiques of dg are as follows i there are errors in the weather data and climate change projections used by dg ii the climate change projections are based on the hadley 2 model and scenarios rather than the more recent hadley 3 model and scenarios iii standard errors are biased due to spatial correlation iv the inclusion of state by year fixed effects does not leave enough weather variation to obtain meaningful estimates of the relationship between agriculture profits and weather v storage and inventory adjustment in response to yield shocks invalidate the use of annual profit data and vi fhrs argue that a better specified hedonic model produces robust estimates unlike the results reported in dg four of these critiques have little basis and we respond to them here in the introduction specifically with respect to ii the more recent daily climate predictions were not available when we wrote dg nevertheless the most important issue is providing the reliable estimates of climate change and in this note we report estimates based on the climate model we used in dg and a more recent one that we gained access to in the meantime iii in the primary table on agricultural profits dg reports two sets of standard errors with the first clustered at the county level and the second based on a variance covariance matrix that accounts for spatial correlation using the method proposed in conley 1999 thus the claim of fhrs 2012 seems overblown nevertheless to ease comparisons of papers in this literature this note will adopt the fhrs convention of reporting estimated standard errors clustered at the county and state levels we find that inference is largely unaffected by the choice between these different assumptions about the variance covariance matrix

does hazardous waste matter evidence from the housing market and the superfund program this paper uses the housing market to develop estimates of the local welfare impacts of superfund sponsored cleanups of hazardous waste sites we show that if consumers value the cleanups then the hedonic model predicts that they will lead to increases in local housing prices and new home construction as well as the migration of individuals that place a high value on environmental quality to the areas near the improved sites we compare housing market outcomes in the areas surrounding the first 400 hazardous waste sites chosen for superfund cleanups to the areas surrounding the 290 sites that narrowly missed qualifying for these cleanups we find that superfund cleanups are associated with economically small and statistically insignificant changes in residential property values property rental rates housing supply total population and types of individuals living near the sites these findings are robust to a series of specification checks including the application of a regression discontinuity design based on knowledge of the selection rule overall the preferred estimates suggest that the local benefits of superfund cleanups are small and appear to be substantially lower than the 43 million mean cost of superfund cleanups

do environmental right to know laws affect markets capitalization of information in the toxic release inventory abstract this paper investigates how information contained in the u s environmental protection agency s toxic release inventory tri program one of the largest environmental right to know programs affects prices in the housing market i use a strengthening of the reporting requirements for the chemical lead in 2001 as exogenous variation to test for housing price changes near existing firms who must now report using a difference in differences specification i find that listing an existing firm in the toxic release inventory lowers housing prices up to 11 within approximately 1 mile the results suggest that housing market participants do capitalize into prices at least some information conveyed by the tri program

do capitalization effects for public goods reveal the public s willingness to pay this article develops a welfare theoretic framework for interpreting evidence on the impacts of public programs on housing markets we extend rosen s hedonic model to explain how housing prices capitalize exogenous shocks to public goods and externalities the model predicts that trading between heterogeneous buyers and sellers will drive a wedge between these capitalization effects and welfare changes we test this hypothesis in the context of changes in measures of school quality in five metropolitan areas results from boundary discontinuity designs suggest that capitalization effects understate parents willingness to pay for public school improvements by as much as 75

externality effects of small scale hazardous waste sites evidence from urban commercial property markets abstract studies have found that severely contaminated properties such as those on the u s epa s national priority list npl reduce the value of nearby single family homes however the vast majority of hazardous waste sites hws are not so severely contaminated as those on the npl we also know little about hws effects on other land uses such as commercial and industrial properties which may be of greater interest since these properties are more likely to be located near contaminated sites using data for atlanta georgia hws are found to negatively affect the market value of nearby commercial and industrial properties although none of the hws in this study are on the npl their impacts are estimated to be quite substantial in magnitude estimates of the total value losses caused by many of the sites are sufficiently large relative to the cost of remediation to justify tax increment financing as a clean up option

superfund cleanups and infant health in 1980 outcry over the health effects of toxic waste in love canal new york resulted in the comprehensive environmental response compensation and liability act which became known as superfund superfund was intended to provide a mechanism for conducting remedial clean ups at the most dangerous hazardous waste sites over the years it became the largest and most expensive federal program to deal with toxic waste in the us given the substantial cost and slow rate of clean up there is considerable debate on whether it is in the public interest to continue the program in its current form epa 2006 while the costs of the programs are clear its benefits are not well understood indeed the policy is controversial in part because there is a paucity of reliable information on the program s benefits some previous studies find poorer birth outcomes near a site while others do not see martine vrijheid 2000 however evidence of a correlation between proximity to a site and poor birth outcomes does not necessarily represent a causal effect because populations living near hazardous waste sites are typically different from the general population and their health outcomes are likely to differ even in the absence of negative health effects from exposure for example michael greenstone and justin gallagher 2008 found that residents of areas near hazardous waste sites are more likely to be poor and have lower levels of education than others our project is the first to examine the effect of site cleanups on infant health rather than simply focusing on proximity to a site we focus on single births that occurred within 5km of a superfund site between 1989 and 2003 in five large states florida michigan new jersey pennsylvania and texas the basis of our difference in differences approach is to compare changes in birth outcomes before and after a site s clean up among births to mothers who live within 2 000 meters of the site and among those who live between 2 000 and 5 000 meters away our approach is made feasible by access to confidential vital statistics data that includes the exact street address of the mother s residence our large sample gives us statistical power to detect small effects

the value of a statistical life evidence from panel data abstract we address long standing concerns in the literature on compensating wage differentials the econometric properties of the estimated value of statistical life vsl and the wide range of such estimates we confront prominent econometric issues using panel data a more accurate fatality risk measure and systematic application of panel data estimators controlling for measurement error endogeneity latent individual heterogeneity possibly correlated with regressors state dependence and sample composition yields vsl estimates of 4 million to 10 million the comparatively narrow range clarifies the cost effectiveness of regulatory decisions most important econometrically is controlling for latent heterogeneity less important is how one does it

is urban decay bad is urban revitalization bad too abstract neighborhood revitalization could in theory harm some existing residents if it leads to price increases that exceed their willingness to pay i use data from the american housing survey to estimate a discrete choice model identifying households willingness to pay for neighborhood quality these willingness to pay estimates are then compared to the actual price changes that accompany observed changes in neighborhood quality the results suggest that price increases associated with revitalization are smaller than most households willingness to pay for neighborhood improvements conversely declines in neighborhood quality are generally not accompanied by rent declines sufficient to compensate the typical resident for the majority of the population then neighborhood revitalization is beneficial and decline detrimental

using stochastic frontier models to mitigate omitted variable bias in hedonic pricing models a case study for air quality in bogota colombia hedonic pricing models use property value differentials to value changes in environmental quality if unmeasured quality attributes of residential properties are correlated with an environmental quality measure of interest conventional methods for estimating implicit prices will be biased because many unmeasured quality measures tend to be asymmetrically distributed across properties it may be possible to mitigate this bias by estimating a heteroskedastic frontier regression model this approach is demonstrated for a hedonic price function that values air quality in bogota colombia

on the choice of funtional form for hedonic price functions this study examines how errors in measuring marginal attribute pric es vary with the form of the hedonic price function in simulations consumers with known utility functions bid for houses with given attributes various forms of the hedonic function are estimated using equilibrium housing prices errors in estimating marginal attribute prices are calculated by comparing each consumer s equilibrium marginal bid vector with the gradient of the hedonic function when all attributes are observed linear and quadratic box cox forms produce lowest mean percentage errors however when some attributes are unobserved or are replaced by proxies linear and linear box cox functions perform best copyright 1988 by mit press

a reexamination of resource allocation responses to the 65 mph speed limit michael greenstone i introduction in 1987 the federal government allowed states to raise speed limits from 55 mph to 65 mph on a single category of roads rural interstates of the 47 states with rural interstate roads 40 adopted the higher speed limit within a year garber and graham 1990 and ashenfelter and greenstone 2002 document that the fatality rate on rural interstates increased dramatically subsequent to its introduction these studies conclude that higher speed limits lead to higher fatality rates in a recent issue of economic inquiry lave and elias 1997 henceforth l e argue that the full effect of the 65 mph speed limit cannot be inferred by examining rural interstates in isolation from other roads they conjecture that the higher speed limits caused reallocations of drivers and state police that counterbalanced the increased fatality rates on rural interstates in particular they posit that the reduced travel times available on rural interstates induced drivers to switch from dangerous side roads to the safer rural interstates additionally they contend that the higher limits freed the state police from speed enforcement which allowed them to concentrate on activities with greater impacts on fatality rates thus l e s hypothesis is that the full effect of an increase in the speed limit requires an examination of statewide fatality rates figure 1 graphically depicts l e s hypothesis l e present evidence in favor of their hypothesized causal chain first in support of the driver reallocation conjecture they find that between 1986 and 1988 vehicle miles of travel vmt increased on rural interstates where the speed limit was increased to 65 mph second they present anecdotal evidence in favor of the trooper reallocation conjecture third they show that the introduction of the 65 mph limit was associated with a statistically significant decline in statewide fatality rates of 3 4 5 1 thus l e s surprising conclusion is that through driver and trooper reallocations the 1987 increase in speed limits reduced fatality rates this study reexamines l e s empirical results and is unable to confirm them it shows that the statewide fatality rate declined by a statistically insignificant amount in adopting states after 1987 this finding holds when the specification is virtually identical to the one that l e fit and when alternative specifications are estimated although this result directly contradicts l e s primary finding the source of the discrepancy cannot be determined because their data were unavailable it remains puzzling that the large increase in rural interstate fatality rates is not observable in statewide fatality rates an explanation that potentially reconciles this finding with l e s is that the increase on rural interstates was counterbalanced but not swamped by fatality declines induced by the hypothesized reallocations consequently this article also explores whether the 65 mph speed limit caused the reallocations that are the conjectured sources of the statewide decline in fatality rates if these links are not supported by the data it indicates that the statistically insignificant decline in statewide fatality rates cannot be causally related to the two reallocations and in turn to the higher speed limit the links between the 65 mph speed limit and the two reallocations are tested separately first the results suggest that vmt did not increase on rural interstates where the speed limit was raised this finding is derived from a regression on 1982 1990 data whereas l e only compared unadjusted means from 1986 and 1988 moreover it holds when the comparison is to rural interstates in states that did not adopt the higher limit and to both other states and other categories of roads these results fail to provide an empirical basis for the driver reallocation conjecture

evaluating the social optimality of durable public good provision using the housing price response to public investment recent empirical work in public finance uses the housing price response to public investment to assess the efficiency of local durable public good provision this paper explores the theoretical justification for this technique it points out that the logic justifying the technique for evaluating non durable public good provision does not translate to the durable case a model in which investment is determined by the interaction between a budget maximizing bureaucrat and a community s residents is used to demonstrate that the technique can falsely predict under provision falsely predict over provision or perform without error

can stigma explain large property value losses the psychology and economics of superfund this research documents the long term impacts of delayed cleanup on property values in communities neighboring prominent superfund sites the research examines the sale prices of nearly 34 000 homes near sites in three metropolitan areas for up to a 30 year period to our knowledge no other property value studies have examined sites in multiple areas with large property value losses over the length of time used here the results are both surprising and inconsistent with most prior work the principal result is that when cleanup is delayed for 10 15 and even up to 20 years the discounted present value of the cleanup is mostly lost a possible explanation for these property value losses is that the sites are stigmatized and the homes in the surrounding communities are shunned the results suggest that expedited cleanup and minimizing the number of stigmatizing events would reduce these losses

directly unproductive profit seeking dup activities this paper propses directly unproductive profit seeking dup activities as a general concept that embraces a wide range of recently analyzed economic activities including the subset of rent seeking activities considered by krueger it then proceeds to provide a synthesis and generalization of the welfare theoretic analysis of such activities by developing a fourfold categorization of cases depending on the levels of distortions before and after the dup activity thus a unification and overview of the subject are achieved

the distributional effects of pollution regulations do renters fully pay for cleaner air abstract changes in housing prices play an important role in determining the incidence of environmental regulations if the increase in value due to changes in environmental amenities is fully passed forward in the form of higher rental prices renters may receive no net benefit from the regulations to estimate the pass through of the value of an environmental amenity i exploit the reduction in suspended particulate matter pm 10 due to the 1990 clean air act amendments caaa using instrumental variables at varying levels of spatial aggregation i find that the 1990 caaa led to a significant increase in rents but the estimated percentage effect is about half as large as that of owner occupied housing values little of this difference is driven by income differences between renters and homeowners when stratifying by income and comparing the effect of the 1990 caaa on housing values and rents point estimates suggest that half of the increase in value is passed on to renters in the form of higher rents this suggests that pass through may be incomplete but landowners still capture much of the value of the air quality regulations

measuring the external benefits of homeownership abstract the subsidization of homeownership is justified on efficiency grounds only to the extent that it provides benefits to people other than the homeowner we use the clustered neighborhoods subsample in the american housing survey to measure that benefit in the form of higher housing prices in neighborhoods with higher ownership rates and lower vacancies we attempt to account for unobservable neighborhood and house attributes that may be correlated with occupancy and ownership through instrumental variables switching regressions and panel methods estimates indicate that a housing transition from renting to owning creates approximately 1300 in measured benefits

a nested logit migration model with selectivity in this paper we specify a multiple choice migration model with selectivity we estimate this model using observations on individuals drawn from the 1971 census of venezuela there are two main innovations in this paper we apply a correction for the presence of selectivity in wage equations in the context of a multiple choice migration model and we apply a less restrictive technique for modelling multiple discrete choices than in previous studies we study the choices of individuals among 23 states of venezuela each individual is observed to have chosen one state so one wage is observable per person our hypothesis is that individuals choose where to locate on the basis of an evaluation of costs and benefits associated with choosing each state we measure the benefits associated with choosing a given state by means of the wage a person could earn in this state since we observe only one wage for each person we have to impute the unobserved wages for the states this person did not choose in order to study the role of wages in migration however it is possible that unobserved factors which affect both an individual s choice of location and his wages may result in sample selection bias if we try to estimate state specific wage equations by ols on the basis of the self selected samples we apply an estimator proposed by lee 1983 to estimate state specific wage equations free from sample selection bias the wage equations permit us to investigate whether individuals who choose particular states earn different wages from observationally identical individuals drawn from the population at random in the context of a developing country where internal migration flows are large evidence on the selectivity of migration will enhance our understanding of an important labor market adjustment mechanism evidence that people who choose particular locations earn more in those locations than would observationally identical individuals drawn at random from the population positive selection will suggest that migration decisions are made according to the principle of comparative advantage in modelling the choice of location we test whether subsets of states are more highly similar to each other than to other states unobserved similarities between states may arise because of similar amenities or economic conditions which are not otherwise explicitly controlled for in the model we implement the

on the economic impacts of constraining second home investments abstract we investigate how political backlash against wealthy second home investors in high natural amenity places affects local residents we exploit a quasi natural experiment the swiss second home initiative which banned the construction of new second homes in desirable seasonal tourist locations consistent with our model we find that the ban substantially lowered increased the price growth of primary second homes and increased the unemployment growth rate in the affected areas our findings suggest that the negative effect on local economies dominated the positive amenity preservation effect we conclude that constraining second home construction in seasonal tourist locations where primary and second homes are not close substitutes may reinforce wealth inequality

the value of a healthy home lead paint remediation and housing values abstract the presence of lead paint significantly impairs cognitive and behavioral development yet little is known about the value to households of avoiding this residence specific environmental health risk in this paper we estimate the benefits of lead paint remediation on housing prices using data on all homes that applied to a hud funded program in charlotte north carolina we adopt a difference in differences estimator that compares values among remediated properties with those for which an inspection does not identify a lead paint hazard results indicate large returns for public and private investment in remediation with each 1 spent on lead remediation generating 2 60 in benefits as well as a reduction in residential turnover

are all economic facts greatly exaggerated theory competition and selectivity there is growing concern and mounting evidence of selectivity in empirical economics most empirical economic literatures have a truncated distribution of results the aim of this paper is to explore the link between publication selectivity and theory contests this link is confirmed through the analysis of 87 distinct empirical economics literatures involving more than three and a half thousand separate empirical studies using objective measures of both selectivity and contests our meta meta analysis shows that publication selection is widespread but not universal it distorts scientific inference with potentially adverse effects on policy making but competition and debate between rival theories reduces this selectivity and thereby improves economic inference

universal health insurance in the clinton plan coverage as a tax financed public good the financing arrangements embodied in the clinton health reform plan involve some important differences in the way in which public goods are usually financed the subsidies to small low wage firms mandated to provide benefits distort markets in both labor and products and offer incentives for the creation of small firms in addition the financing scheme implicitly envisions a head tax on families at modest income levels but offers a possible rationale for it nevertheless the main reason for many of the financing features appears to be an attempt to hold down the apparent budgetary cost of universal coverage

rent seeking from a property rights perspective james buchanan 15 15 has suggested that rent seeking analysis can readily be incorporated within the property rights approach and as with public choice the theory of rent seeking can be interpreted as an appropriate extension yet no one has really explored rent seeking or revenue premium tariff or directly unproductive profit seeking from a property rights perspective buchanan 14 15 16 17 clearly indicated that property rights assignments actually underlie the rent seeking process and others have also recognized this 4 20 23 28 but there are further insights into the workings of the political economy which can be derived for instance lobbying activities with nonpecuniary goals clearly fit into the rent seeking framework when viewed through the property rights paradigm this contrasts strikingly with the perception of rent seeking held by some writers 9 10 11 12 13 furthermore a property rights approach to rent seeking provides predictions of a spiraling process of government growth since successful rent seeking by one interest group generally requires expansion of bureaucratic powers while at the same time creating incentives for the formation of additional rent seeking interest groups legislative responses to these new groups requires further expansion of the bureaucracy and creates incentives for more rent seeking so the growth process continues in this paper a brief summary of the conclusions of the rent seeking literature will be presented followed by an explanation of how the same conclusions have been deduced using the property rights paradigm various extensions of the rent seeking concept such as those alluded to above are then obtained by emphasizing a property rights approach following this the terms used to describe rent seeking e g directly unproductive profit seeking etc will be discussed to determine which if any is the most appropriate characterization of the phenomenon

cross country heterogeneity in intertemporal substitution abstract we collect 2735 estimates of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption from 169 published studies that cover 104 countries during different time periods the estimates vary substantially from country to country even after controlling for 30 aspects of study design our results suggest that income and asset market participation are the most effective factors in explaining the heterogeneity households in rich countries and countries with high stock market participation substitute a larger fraction of consumption intertemporally in response to changes in expected asset returns micro level studies that focus on sub samples of rich households or asset holders also find systematically larger values of the elasticity

who benefits from environmental regulation evidence from the clean air act amendments abstract using geographically disaggregated data and exploiting an instrumental variable strategy we show that contrary to conventional wisdom the benefits of the 1990 clean air act amendments caaa were progressive the caaa created incentives for local regulators to target the initially dirtiest areas for cleanup creating heterogeneity in the incidence of air quality improvements that favored lower income households based on house price appreciation households in the lowest quintile of the income distribution received annual benefits from the program equal to 0 3 of their income on average during the 1990s over twice as much as those in the highest quintile

wages rents and the quality of life this study focuses on the role of wages and rents in allocating workers to locations with various quantities of amenities the theory demonstrates that if the amenity is also productive then the sign of the wage gradient is unclear while the rent gradient is positive the theory is extended to include the housing market and nontraded goods these extensions require little modification of the conclusion the empirical work on wages shows that the regional wage differences can be explained largely by these local attributes with the use of site price data implicit prices are estimated and quality of life rankings for the cities are computed

spatial hedonic models for environmental hazards and health outcomes this article examines the relationship between the total cost of services for radioprotection and the health outcomes in greece with a spatial hedonic model using data from the period 2010 to 2016

inequality at birth some causes and consequences recent research shows that health at birth is affected by many factors including maternal education behaviors and participation in social programs in turn endowments at birth are predictive of adult outcomes and of the outcomes of future generations exposure to environmental pollution is one potential determinant of health at birth that has received increasing attention a large literature outside of economics advocates for environmental justice and argues that poor and minority families are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards i provide new evidence on this question showing that children born to less educated and minority mothers are more likely to be exposed to pollution in utero and that white college educated mothers are particularly responsive to changes in environmental amenities i estimate that differences in exposure to toxic releases may explain 6 of the gap in incidence of low birth weight between infants of white college educated mothers and infants of black high school dropout mothers this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

cooperative lobbying and endogenous trade policy this paper considers trade policies in a small open economy in which two influential interest groups lobby the government since competitive lobbying leads to excessive rent seeking expenditures the lobbies have an incentive to cooperate the outcome of cooperative lobbying is characterized in terms of lobbying and bargaining power of the two groups two important results are derived first if the power of competing interest groups is balanced then cooperation leads to free trade second if it is unbalanced cooperation may on the contrary increase protection

how to solve the price puzzle a meta analysis the short run increase in prices following an unexpected tightening of monetary policy constitutes a frequently reported puzzle yet the puzzle is surprisingly easy to explain away when all published models are quantitatively reviewed we collect about 1 000 point estimates of impulse responses from 70 articles using vector autoregressive models and present a simple method of research synthesis for graphical results our ndings indicate publication selection in favor of the intuitive response of prices to a tightening the estimates depend systematically on study design when misspecications are

measuring intertemporal substitution the importance of method choices and selective reporting i examine 2 735 estimates of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption eis reported in 169 published studies the literature shows strong selective reporting researchers discard negative and insignicant estimates too often which pulls the mean estimate up by about 0 5 the reporting bias dwarfs the effects of methods with the exception of the choice between micro and macro data when i correct the mean for the bias for macro estimates i get zero even though the reported t statistics are on average two the corrected mean of micro estimates of the eis for asset holders is around 0 3 0 4 calibrations greater than 0 8 are inconsistent with the bulk of the empirical evidence jel e21 c83

quasi experiments hedonic models and estimating trade offs for local amenities this paper evaluates whether the property value capitalization effects measured with quasi experimental methods offer reliable estimates of willingness to pay for changes in amenities we propose the use of a market simulation as a robustness check two applications establish the method s relevance the first examines the conversion of land cover from desert to wet landscape the second examines cleanup of hazardous waste sites we find that even when quasi experimental methods have access to ideal instruments their performance in measuring general equilibrium willingness to pay cannot be assumed ideal it needs to be evaluated considering the specific features of each application jel q51

lobbying dup activities and welfare a response to tullock professor tullock 1981 in trying to understand the results in my 1981 paper on lobbying and welfare has raised issues that require further clarification and analysis for brevity s sake i shall concentrate here on the essentials leaving minor remarks of tullock s aside 1 the specific case of lobbying which i addressed originally was tariffseeking by pr otectionist lobbies so that the tariff would be endogenous i then showed that one could not argue in this instance that an exogenouslyspecified tariff at x was necessarily welfare superior to an endogenous tariff at x0 all other forms of lobbying were excluded of course 2 tullock argues that this result obtains because he and krueger 1974 think whereas i do not that tariff rcvcnucs can be wasted as it happens krueger 1974 made no such assumption she explicitly compared in her analysis of the specific cast of premium seeking for import quotas aircad in place quotas with such premium seeking with tariffs that had no corresponding revenue seeking or for that matter any waste resulting from the government directly expending the tariff revenue bhagwati and srinivasan 1980 were the first to introduce the revenue seeking concept and to argue that it was wholly inappropriate for krueger to compare tariffs and quotas on the assumption that the latter gave rise to fill premium seeking whereas the former gave rise to zero revenue seeking

an embarrassment of riches confronting omitted variable bias and multiscale capitalization in hedonic price models abstract many researchers have addressed concerns of omitted variable bias in hedonic price models through the use of spatial fixed effects we argue that this approach does not consider the biases introduced by effects that overlap the zone of capitalization for nonmarket goods we show this bias can dominate the usual omitted variable bias using data on developer provided open space we control for multiscale capitalization and omitted variables simultaneously by extending the hausman taylor estimator where the panel component of the estimator is defined over repeated transactions within neighborhoods rather than the traditional definition following a unique cross sectional unit through time

inflation targeting genuine effects or publication selection bias abstract this paper uses a meta regression analysis mra to evaluate the impact of publication selection bias as for the macroeconomic effects of inflation targeting it a popular approach to implementing monetary policy documented in the existing literature using 8 059 point estimates from 113 studies we show that a significant part of the documented positive effects of it on inflation and to some extent output growth volatility is in fact due to publication selection bias in particular results pointing to lower inflation volatility and higher real gdp growth tend to be favored by researchers as well as those pointing to statistically significant macroeconomic effects however even after controlling for these two types of biases we find it to be correlated with lower inflation and higher real gdp growth differently the evidence on the it inflation volatility relationship is found to be less clear

what are the benefits of the water framework directive lessons learned for policy design from preference revelation the water framework directive wfd seeks to achieve good ecological status of surface waters across the european union by 2027 the wfd guidelines explicitly recognize the economics of water management by providing exceptions to water areas with disproportionately high restoration costs this calls indirectly for estimations of benefits lost due to non attainment we employ a hedonic property pricing approach on waterfront recreational properties to estimate the welfare impacts of attaining the good ecological status described by the wfd the empirical challenge is that the quality measure proposed by the wfd specifically denotes ecological quality whereas economically measurable water quality values are heavily dependent on recreation impacts intuitively the choice of water quality measure should have an effect on estimating the value of water quality our data provide a unique chance to compare three alternative indicators of water quality 1 a usability based index 2 subjectively reported measure and 3 the ecological status determined by the wfd we find that an improvement in water quality is associated with a statistically significant non linear change in recreational property values we show how the ecological status compares with the other two indicators and discuss the justifiability of using revealed preference methods when the valued good is defined purely on the basis of ecological criteria

anyone for higher speed limits self interested and adaptive political preferences swedish survey evidence indicates that variables reflecting self interest are important in explaining people s preferred speed limits and that political preferences adapt to technological development drivers who believe they drive better than the average driver as well as drivers of cars that are newer and hence safer bigger and with better highspeed characteristics prefer higher speed limits in contrast elderly people prefer lower speed limits furthermore people report that they themselves vote more sociotropically than they believe others vote on average indicating that we may vote less sociotropically than we believe ourselves one possible reason for such self serving biases is that people desire to see themselves as socially responsible

using mandated speed limits to measure the value of a statistical life in 1987 the federal government permitted states to raise the speed limit on their rural interstate roads but not on their urban interstate roads from 55 mph to 65 mph since the states that adopted the higher speed limit must have valued the travel hours they saved more than the fatalities incurred this institutional change provides an opportunity to estimate an upper bound on the public s willingness to trade off wealth for a change in the probability of death our estimates indicate that the adoption of the 65 mph limit increased speeds by approximately 4 percent or 2 5 mph and fatality rates by roughly 35 percent together the estimates suggest that about 125 000 hours were saved per lost life when the time saved is valued at the average hourly wage the estimates imply that adopting states were willing to accept risks that resulted in a savings of 1 54 million 1997 dollars per fatality with a sampling error roughly one third this value we set out a simple model of states decisions to adop

migration amongst the batswana the present study undertakes analysis of the effects of employment probabilities and wage alternatives on migration decisions in the context of botswana adopting micro level data both to estimate a multinomial migration function and to develop prediction equations for wages and likelihood of employment data are from the 1978 1979 national migration survey the factors that influence rural batswana adults to remain at home migrate to town on a short or long term basis move to another rural area or emigrate to south africa are examined consideration is given to the effects of employment alternatives on the rate of internal migration and the selectivity of movements with respect to personal household and locational factors excerpt

an econometric analysis of land development with endogenous zoning zoning is a widely used tool to manage residential growth estimating the effect of zoning on development however is difficult because zoning can be endogenous in models of land conversion we compare three econometric methods that account for selection bias in a model of land conversion a jointly estimated probit logit model propensity score matching and regression discontinuity our results suggest that not accounting for selection bias leads to erroneous estimates after correcting for selection bias we find that zoning has no effect on a landowner s decision to subdivide in a rural wisconsin county

the effect of legalizing retail marijuana on housing values evidence from colorado does legalizing retail marijuana generate more benefits than costs this paper provides a first step toward addressing that question by measuring the benefits and costs that are capitalized into housing values we exploit the time series and cross sectional variations in the adoption of colorado s municipality retail marijuana laws rmls and examine the effect on housing values with a difference in differences strategy our estimates show that the legalization leads to an average 6 increase in housing values indicating that the capitalized benefits outweigh the costs in addition we find suggestive evidence that this relatively large housing value appreciation is likely due to rmls inducing strong housing demand while having no discernible effect on housing supply finally we show that the effect of rmls is heterogeneous across locations and property types jel k20 r28

valuation of small and multiple health risks a critical analysis of sp data applied to food and water safety this study elicits individual risk preferences in the context of an infectious disease using choice experiments a main objective is to examine scope sensitivity using a novel approach our results suggest that the value of a mortality risk reduction vsl is highly sensitive to the survey design our results cast doubt on the standard scope sensitivity tests in choice experiments but also on the validity and reliability of vsl estimates based on stated preference studies in general this is important due to the large empirical literature on non market evaluation and the elicited values central role in policy making

assessing the incidence and efficiency of a prominent place based policy abstract this paper empirically assesses the incidence and efficiency of round i of the federal urban empowerment zone ez program using confidential microdata from the decennial census and the longitudinal business database using rejected and future applicants to the ez program as controls we find that ez designation substantially increased employment in zone neighborhoods and generated wage increases for local workers without corresponding increases in population or the local cost of living the results suggest the efficiency costs of first round ezs were relatively modest jel h26 h77 j31 r23 r58

ease vs noise long run changes in the value of transport dis amenities for a complete cost benefit analysis of durable infrastructures it is important to understand how the value of non market goods such as transit time and environmental quality changes as incomes rise in the long run we use difference in differences and spatial differencing to estimate the land price capitalization effects of metro rail in berlin germany today and a century ago over this period the negative implicit hedonic price of rail noise tripled our results imply income elasticities of the value of noise reduction and transport access of 2 2 and 1 4 substantially exceeding cross sectional contingent valuation estimates

are risk regulators rational evidence from hazardous waste cleanup decisions a large literature in economics and social science focuses on how people reason about risks reactions of individuals to risk frequently depart from behavior predicted by full information variants of expected utility theory risk regulators are human and are subject to political pressures that are reflective of people s attitudes toward risk as a result the public policies they espouse may reflect errors in judgment about risk many biases stem from misperceptions of risk individuals overestimate small probabilities overestimate the risks associated with highly publicized dangers and have preferences over the manner not just the magnitude in which risks arise environmental risks associated with hazardous waste sites may be particularly prone to such errors since they involve small risks that are highly publicized indeed the general public ranks hazardous waste sites as the leading environmental risk a growing literature also analyzes how the decisions of risk regulators depart from choices predicted in a standard benefit cost framework as roger g noll and james e krier 1990 point out since regulators are both human and political their decisions may reflect risk biases regulators may exhibit these biases as individuals and because their constituents will express regulatory demands based on risk perceptions risk regulators may take into account the identity of the parties exposed to risk the level of scrutiny by interest groups the nature of congressional representation of affected constituents and the degree of political activity by potentially exposed individuals 3 errors in risk perceptions and risk decisions cause individuals to diverge from expected utility maximization similar errors by policy makers and the influence of risk politics cause regulators to diverge from social welfare maximization this paper examines decisions made by federal and state regulators at hazardous waste sites addressed by the superfund program to determine how their decisions diverge from those predicted by expected utility theory and benefitcost analysis we analyze whether risk perceptions and politics influence two decisions central to the how clean is clean debate at superfund sites the selection of chemical cleanup targets and the expenditure of remediation funds at these contaminated sites we also explore the interactive influence of risk perception factors and political demands previous research on the regulation of chemical risks in standard setting indicates that decisions reflect evidence of risk biases and responsiveness to political factors in assessing the determinants of the epa s decision to cancel pesticide registration maureen l cropper et al 1992 found that the epa was more likely to cancel a pesticide in instances featuring higher risks to the maximally exposed individual user lower benefits associated with continued use of the pesticide higher values of intervention by environmental groups mea viscusi harvard law school harvard university cambridge ma 02138 hamilton sanford institute of public policy duke university durham nc 27708 we have benefited from the comments from two referees and the excellent research assistance of jason bell kristen blann jahn hakes and robert malme research support was provided under cooperative agreement no cr 823604 01 from the u s environmental protection agency office of policy planning and evaluation dr alan carlin and dr suzanne giannini spohn served as contract officers all views and errors expressed are our own l see u s environmental protection agency epa 1987 for a report on this survey evidence 2 this theme is also articulated in richard j zeckhauser and viscusi 1990 noll 1989 provides a more general assessment of the interaction between political concerns and regulatory policy which is a central theme of this paper 3political factors have long played a prominent role in local hazardous waste policies see among others linda cohen 1981 howard kunreuther and douglas easterling 1990 1992 and kunreuther and rajeev gowda 1990

worker investments in safety workplace accidents and compensating wage differentials the theory of compensating wage differentials cwds assumes that firms supply and workers demand workplace safety predicting a positive relationship between accident risk and wages this article allows for safety provision by workers which predicts a countervailing negative relationship between individual risk and wages firms pay higher wages for higher safety related productivity using national longitudinal survey of youth panel data and data on fatal and nonfatal accidents our precise cwds imply a value of a statistical injury of 45 4 thousand and a value of a statistical life of 6 3 million in line with our model individual risk and wages are negatively correlated

applying regression discontinuity designs to american political development students of american political development apd have long been interested in questions related to the development of state capacity in the united states the apparent macro level nature of those questions may appear to discourage the pursuit of micro level causal inferences yet attention to causal inference is not necessarily incompatible with inquiry into macro level phenomena this article explores the application of a specific causal inference strategy namely regression discontinuity design rdd to three questions of interest to apd scholars of state capacity first the article illustrates the use of a geographic rdd to estimate the causal impacts of a reconstruction era federal civil rights statute during the period prior to the development of significant federal state capacity second it explores the possible causes of the late 19th century decline in the use of monetary rewards to motivate civil servants by using a population based rdd to estimate the causal impacts of financial incentives on law enforcement effort and civilian compliance third it illustrates an opportunity to test claims about the impacts of the growth of the carceral state by applying a resource constraint rdd to estimate the causal impacts of law enforcement effort on a variety of outcomes

comparing alternative policies to reduce traffic accidents abstract this paper derives and implements formulas for the welfare effects of uniform mileage taxes gasoline taxes per mile insurance premiums and mileage taxes differentiated across vehicle and driver groups for reducing the external costs of passenger vehicle accidents the average external accident cost is estimated at 2 2 6 6 cents per mile accidents costs differ substantially across driver groups but only moderately across vehicles groups annual welfare gains from a mileage tax equal to marginal external costs for each driver vehicle group are 9 4 billion in the benchmark case the uniform mileage tax and per mile insurance reform can achieve 76 and 65 of this welfare gain respectively while the gasoline tax can achieve only 28 of the welfare gain unlike other policies the gasoline tax induces costly improvements in average fleet fuel economy that have little effect on reducing external costs

resource allocation in public policy the effects of the 65 mph speed limit i background previous work lave 1985 shows that highway fatality rates are strongly related to the variation in speed between cars variance kills what matters most in setting a speed limit is choosing one that people will obey hence reducing variance between cars this paper looks at another consideration for setting a speed limit how will the limit affect the allocation of vehicles across alternative roads and the allocation of policing resources across alternative safety activities this resource allocation perspective leads to the development of a new criterion for judging safety effects instead of measuring the local effect of a speed limit change we should measure the statewide effect because a reallocation of traffic and patrol activities will have systemwide consequences this perspective is analogous to the study of offsetting behavior pioneered by peltzman 1975 a government s attempt to improve the safety characteristics of a product may be offset by behavioral changes in the use of the product thus substantially weakening the expected safety improvement and possibly even making the overall situation worse 1 if this has occurred then we should be able to detect an increase in safety when the government regulation is reversed in 1987 the federal government allowed states to raise speed limits on their rural interstate highways 40 states did so some reports show that fatalities increased baum et al 1990 national highway traffic safety administration 1989 gallagher et al 1989 however they only look at local effects fatalities on a particular highway before and after the speed limit change this is not the relevant criterion ii consequences of raising the speed limit raising the speed limit might have consequences for the allocation of policing resources and the allocation of traffic consider the policing resources first the allocation of policing resources there is strong evidence that the state highway patrols felt they had been forced to misallocate their manpower because of the federally mandated 55 mph national maximum speed limit the federal government had imposed detailed compliance requirements that required strict new enforcement efforts 2 in response highway patrols shifted resources from other safety activities e g drunk driving checkpoints and truck safety to speed enforcement on the interstate highways these highways have the densest concentration of high speed traffic hence a patrol hour of activity there will control the greatest number of potential speeders by 1983 29 of patrol hours were devoted to rural interstate highways though these were already the safest highways and produced only 9 of fatalities national research council 1984 227 the state highway patrols were well aware that this was a peculiar way to allocate manpower testifying before congress the international association of chiefs of police said federal financial sanctions force the over concentration of limited resources for the express purpose of attaining compliance rather than application of resources in a manner most effectively enhancing total highway safety tippet 1990 and following the speed limit increase to 65 mph they took the opportunity to reallocate patrol resources 3 the allocation of highway resources for physical reasons the interstates are our safest roads higher legal speeds on the interstates would be expected to lure traffic away from other roads hence reducing fatalities on the less safe roads is there evidence that traffic did shift to the interstates following the speed limit increase we need to measure change relative to some expected baseline table i does this in two different ways part a concentrates on the states that increased speed limits to 65 mph for these states it compares the growth of vehicle miles traveled vmt on specific highway types to the overall vmt growth rate in the state

residential property price differentials of waste plants evidence from beijing china as a primary source of urban pollution waste plants release toxic gases and polluted waste water that can cause great harm to human health and contaminate water resources the adverse impact of wa

u s housing prices and the fukushima nuclear accident abstract did the nuclear catastrophe at fukushima in march 2011 cause individuals to reappraise the risks they attach to nuclear power plants we investigate the change in home prices in the u s after the fukushima event to test the hypothesis that home prices in the proximity of power plants fell due to an updated nuclear risk perception using a difference in differences approach we do not find evidence in support of the hypothesis that individuals reappraised the risks associated with nuclear power plants according to our results home prices close to nuclear reactor sites did not fall relative to home prices at other locations in the u s

an interpretation of the effects of age on migration nordic migrants choice of settlement in sweden a model of the relationship between age and migration is developed and applied to data concerning migrants from other scandinavian countries who settled in sweden between 1968 and 1985 the author shows how changes in swedens domestic economic conditions and distance determine the probability for settlement in any of its 24 provinces for migrants of different ages the results show that in the integrated nordic labor market wages at destination do not explain differences in migrants settlement behavior across ages instead they suggest that the major factors to explain the differences are the labor market situation for the different age groups and distance excerpt

hedonic prices and implicit markets estimating demand and supply functions for differentiated products in choosing the level of quality to purchase the buyer of a differentiated product also chooses a point on the marginal price schedule for that product hence in general the demand functions for product characteristics cannot be consistently estimated by ordinary least squares market equilibrium results in a matching of characteristics of demanders and suppliers this matching restricts the use of buyer and seller characteristics as instruments when estimating demand and supply functions for product characteristics the paper develops these issues a stochastic structure for hedonic equilibrium models is then proposed identification results are presented and estimation procedures are outlined

pricing for the clean air evidence from chinese housing market abstract air pollution is widely believed to cause healthy risks and influence nations economic dimensions this paper investigates the impact of air pollution on housing prices in china s 286 prefectural level cities during 2005 2013 to address the endogeneity problem of pm2 5 concentrations in our regression we propose an instrument variable strategy based on ventilation coefficient the estimation results suggest that a 10 increase in pm2 5 concentrations causes a 2 4 reduction in local housing prices air pollution also hinders the progress of urbanization limits cities human capital formation and changes people s expectations of housing prices that we interpret as three potential mechanisms behind our main findings

hazardous waste hits hollywood superfund and housing prices in los angeles this paper contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the effect of various actions taken by the u s environmental protection agency under cercla commonly known as the superfund program on housing prices this study uses a housing transaction panel dataset encompassing the five major counties of the los angeles combined statistical area to estimate the program s influence on the local housing market using house and time varying census tract fixed effects i am able to avoid many of the endogeneity problems seen in previous research attempting to measure the superfund treatment effect an estimate of the effect on housing prices is given for each of the major events that occur under a typical superfund remediation after controlling for confounding correlated unobservables i find a 7 3 increase in sales price for houses within 3 km of a site that moves through the complete superfund program the analysis gives evidence of positive price appreciation for housing markets and serves as a lower bound for measuring remediation benefits

migration and remigration of male household heads in turkey 1963 1973 this article offers an overview of aggregate migration flows in turkey during 1963 73 and then develops models for explaining the qualitative and quantitative importance of various factors behind migration and remigration during 1963 73 the framework is based on the economic theories of migration that view geographic mobility as a response to differential earning opportunities distributed over time and across space the analysis accounts for the impact of regional and macroeconomic variables on migration status while controlling for personal characteristics including migration history the model uses a discrete choice formulation that accounts for consideration of remigration at the time of the initial migration decision migration status is assessed at the province district and village levels over 5 and 10 year intervals the author uses six different definitions of migration during 1950 80 turkey experienced rapid urbanization and migration from economically backward areas to more dynamic areas usually in the western region data for the study were obtained from a sample of household heads from the male survey portion of the 1973 retrospective survey of the structure of population and population problems findings indicate that undesirable work conditions in the sending area such as limited job opportunities lack of job related security and unemployment plus human capital variables had a strong impact on the migration decision the main finding is that regional and macroeconomic variables had a significant impact when individual heterogeneity was controlled for it is argued that policy variables can reverse the impact of economic variables only by inducing extreme changes in the human capital variables migration policies should be directed at changing broad regional economic structures findings varied with the definition of migration and time results improved by distinguishing between return migrants and repeat migrants

determinants of migration in the nordic labor market migration flows in the integrated nordic labor market are heavily dominated by finnish migration to sweden differences in migration behavior across the nordic populations are identified elasticities of migration are obtained from a logistic human capital model estimated as seemingly unrelated regressions differences in migration behavior are shown to exist but the elasticities are not systematically higher for the finns as could be expected the domination of finnish migration to sweden is instead explained by real wage differences and since these have narrowed major migration flows should not be expected in the future unless large differences in labor market performance arise excerpt

paying for permanence an economic analysis of epa s cleanup decisions at superfund sites we analyze epa s cleanup decisions at over 100 superfund sites and examine whether and how epa trades off the cost against the permanence of cleanup epa s decisions reveal both a preference for permanent solutions and an aversion to cost for example epa prefers incinerating soils to isolating and containing them in place but not at any price at larger sites epa appears willing to accept additional costs of as much as 40 million to incinerate with regard to environmental equity we find little evidence that epa s cost permanence tradeoff is affected by socioeconomic characteristics in the communities surrounding the sites