Valuing Ecological Improvements in the Chesapeake Bay and the Importance of Ancillary Benefits.

Reducing the excess nutrient and sediment pollution that is damaging habitat and diminishing recreational experiences in coastal estuaries requires actions by people and communities that are within the boundaries of the watershed but may be far from the resource itself, thus complicating efforts to understand tradeoffs associated with pollution control measures. Such is the case with the Chesapeake Bay, one of the most iconic water resources in the United States. All seven states containing part of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed were required under the Clean Water Act to submit detailed plans to achieve nutrient and sediment pollution reductions.

Policy Brief - What's in a Name? A Search for Alternatives to "VSL".

Benefit-cost analyses of environmental, health, and safety regulations often rely on an estimate of the value of statistical life (VSL) to calculate the aggregate benefits of reducing human mortality risk. The VSL represents the marginal rate of substitution between mortality risk and money. Although this concept is well-understood by economists, it is viewed by many non-economists as confusing technical jargon that borders on the immoral.

Retrospective Evaluation of the Costs of Complying with Light-Duty Vehicle Surface Coating Requirements.

This paper compares the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) ex-ante compliance cost estimates for the 2004 Automobile and Light-Duty Truck Surface Coating National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants to ex-post evidence on the actual costs of compliance based on ex-post cost data gathered from a subset of the industry via pilot survey and follow-up interviews.

Risk assessment for benefits analysis: framework for analysis of a thyroid-disrupting chemical.

Benefit-cost analysis is of growing importance in developing policies to reduce exposures to environmental contaminants. To quantify health benefits of reduced exposures, economists generally rely on dose-response relationships estimated by risk assessors. Further, to be useful for benefits analysis, the endpoints that are quantified must be expressed as changes in incidence of illnesses or symptoms that are readily understood by and perceptible to the layperson.

Linking economics and risk assessment.

Benefit-cost analysis relies heavily upon risk assessment. The extent to which benefits can be quantitatively included in an economic analysis is frequently determined by risk assessment methods. Therefore, interdisciplinary collaboration between economists and experts in risk assessment-related disciplines is critical to further development of quantitative human health benefits analysis.

What to do at low doses: a bounding approach for economic analysis.

To quantify the health benefits of environmental policies, economists generally require estimates of the reduced probability of illness or death. For policies that reduce exposure to carcinogenic substances, these estimates traditionally have been obtained through the linear extrapolation of experimental dose-response data to low-exposure scenarios as described in the U.S.

Valuation of childhood risk reduction: the importance of age, risk preferences, and perspective.

This article explores two problems analysts face in determining how to estimate values for children's health and safety risk reductions. The first addresses the question: Do willingness-to-pay estimates for health risk changes differ across children and adults and, if so, how? To answer this question, the article first examines the potential effects of age and risk preferences on willingness to pay. A summary of the literature reporting empirical evidence of differences between willingness to pay for adult health and safety risk reductions and willingness to pay for health and safety risk reductions in children is also provided.