Cleve E. Willis

Local Environmental Control and Institutional Crowding-Out

Regulations that are designed to improve social welfare typically begin with the premise that individuals are purely self-interested. Experimental evidence shows, however, that individuals do not typically behave this way; instead, they tend to strike a balance between self and group interests. From experiments performed in rural Colombia, we found that a regulatory solution for an environmental dilemma that standard theory predicts would improve social welfare clearly did not. This occurred because individuals confronted with the regulation began to exhibit less other-regarding behavior and made choices that were more self-interested; that is, the regulation appeared to crowd out other-regarding behavior.

Power distribution, the environment, and public health: A state-level analysis

Abstract This paper examines relationships among power distribution, the environment, and public health by means of a cross-sectional analysis of the 50 US states. A measure of inter-state variations in power distribution is derived from data on voter participation, tax fairness, Medicaid access, and educational attainment. We develop and estimate a recursive model linking the distribution of power to environmental policy, environmental stress, and public health. The results support the hypothesis that greater power inequality leads to weaker environmental policies, which in turn lead to greater environmental degradation and to adverse public health outcomes.

Economic inequality and burden-sharing in the provision of local environmental quality

A large, but inconclusive, literature addresses how economic heterogeneity affects the use of local resources and local environmental quality. One line of thought, which derives from Nash equilibrium provision of public goods, suggests that in contexts in which individual actions degrade local environmental quality, wealthier people in a community will tend to do more to protect environmental quality. In this paper we report on experiments performed in rural Colombia that were designed to explore the role that economic inequality plays in the ‘provision’ of local environmental quality. Subjects were asked to decide how much time to devote to collecting firewood from a local forest, which degrades local water quality, and how much to unrelated pursuits. Economic heterogeneity was introduced by varying the private returns to these alternative pursuits. Consistent with the Nash equilibrium prediction, we found that the players with more valuable alternative options put less pressure on local water quality. However, the subjects with less valuable alternative options showed significantly more restraint relative to their pure Nash strategies. Furthermore, they were willing to bear significantly greater opportunity costs to move their groups to outcomes that yielded higher average payoffs and better water quality than the Nash equilibrium outcome.

Estimation of Substitution Possibilities between Water and Other Production Inputs

The traditional approach to measuring the demand for water by industries relies upon fixed water-use coefficients. Water supply planners base decisions about system expansion partly upon fixed coefficients applied to projected levels of industrial growth. Among the restrictive assumptions implied by this approach is that producers are generally unresponsive to the relative price of water compared with other factors. Earlier studies focused on industry-by-industry assessments of present and potential water use technologies and the possibilities for substituting other productive inputs for water. Most of these studies are economic engineering in form. Thompson and Young and Russell are analyses of the steam electric-generating industry and the petroleum refining and petrochemical industry, respectively. Because they used linear programming techniques, their results must be interpreted cautiously. The flexible functional forms which have become

A Comparison of Generating Techniques and Goal Programming for Public Investment, Multiple Objective Decision Making

The move toward public decision making based on multiple objective analysis has occurred largely during the past decade. During this brief interval dozens of techniques have been advanced for this purpose. The class of (generating) techniques which do not require prior articulation of preferences and which provide alternative solutions rather than a single optimum is characterized and compared to goal programming. Goal programming, as generally employed, seeks a single optimum solution given an articulated set of targets and priorities on the relevant objectives. Four criteria were used in this comparison and neither approach was found to be unambiguously superior.

Household Hazardous Waste in Massachusetts

Household wastes, when disposed of improperly, are hazardous to health. This paper reports a random digit dial telephone survey of Massachusetts households concerning household hazardous waste (HHW) disposal with a 54% response. Of the automotive oil disposed of by 33% of survey households, 57% was deposited in the ground, sewer, or landfill. Annually by household oil disposal in Massachusetts is estimated to be 8.8 million quarts. Four percent of hazardous waste generated in Massachusetts is from households. Improper disposal makes it a major environmental contaminant. More households (41.5%) in smaller communities disposed of oil compared with 26% of households in larger communities. Paint and pesticides were disposed of by 10% of the households, but were dumped on the ground sewer or landfills more than 90% of the time.

The Hedonic Approach: No Panacea for Valuing Water Quality Changes

The hedonic approach has been advanced recently as an important tool for assessing the value of non-market environmental attributes. In its most usual form, the method involves an attempt econometrically to capture differential prices for homes attributable to variations in the environmental characteristic. This technique has been applied with success for a variety of attributes - most notably the study of air pollution. However, the case studies reported here for water quality valuation were much less successful. We advance several reasons why the hedonic approach may be ill-suited to measuring the value of water quality.

Groundwater protection in mixed land-use aquifers

Compared with groundwater pollution episodes of a point-source nature, nonpoint-source contamination makes for particularly difficult policy design. This is especially true in the context of a mixed land-use aquifer, where the same pollutant may derive from various human land-use activities and in different concentrations. To data, the emprirical literature attempting to estimate the relative loadings of pollutants from alternative land uses is rather sparse. Yet this information is vital to a variety of numerical computer models used to predict likelihood of groundwater contamination, and the statistical results are useful in their own right for regional policy formation. Regression analysis is applied to estimate loadings of nitrate and sodium from various land uses. The model is then used to illustrate how well-intended local groundwater protection policies that fail to recognize land-use substitution and cross-pollutant effects may be misdirected.

MULTICOLLINEARITY: EFFECTS, SYMPTOMS, AND REMEDIES

Multicollinearity is one of several problems confronting researchers using regression analysis. This paper examines the regression model when the assumption of independence among Ute independent variables is violated. The basic properties of the least squares approach are examined, the concept of multicollinearity and its consequences on the least squares estimators are explained. The detection of multicollinearity and alternatives for handling the problem are then discussed. The alternative approaches evaluated are variable deletion, restrictions on the parameters, ridge regression and Bayesian estimation.

Application of mean-Gini stochastic efficiency analysis

This article adds to the information base concerning the applicability of mean- Gini stochastic efficiency analysis in agriculture. The mean-Gini efficient set of decisions is characterized rigorously in terms of its corresponding absolute risk aversion. In an empirical analysis, the mean-Gini efficient set of decisions is derived for four studies from the literature and compared to the second degree stochastic dominance efficient set. An alternative quantitative measure of risk aversion is used to gain insight in a visceral sense to the risk preferences associated with mean-Gini efficient decisions.