The hedonic approach has been advanced recently as an inportant 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 stu<¥ of air pollution. HCJ.'Iever, the case studies reported here for water quality valuation were nuch less successful. We advance several reasons why the hedonic approach J"C"BY be ill-suited to measuring the value of water quality.

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.

The current issues of landfill bans, groundwater contamination, waste-end taxes and source reduction of hazardous wastes have rekindled interest in a systems view of environmental management, While this recent interest is new, the basic concept is not. The physical Law of Conservation of Mass as embodied in materials or mass balance has underlain most residuals management research (e.g. Ayres and Kneese [1969]; Kneese and Bower [1979]). As society grapples with the complex problem of toxic and hazardous chemical residues and their distribution in the environment, mass balance is receiving renewed attention in the form of cross-media transfers. The focus of this renewed interest is the movement and transformation of residuals among environmental media (soil, air and water) after discharge. Our early public lessons in applied ecology taught us that the environment is a single integrated system and that there are frequently unintended consequences associated with the human use of that environment. The contemporary lessons from the identification and cleanup of uncontrolled hazardous waste sites under the ‘‘Superfund” program lends a new impetus to our reconsideration of these concepts. Cross-media transfers of pollutants are generally differentiated on the basis of causation. Some authors (Lowe, Lewis and Atkins [1982]) reserve the transfer designation for those migrations of residuals among media that are the result of natural processes such as precipitation, leaching, or sedimentation. Clearly, the heated policy debate surrounding the land disposal of hazardous and toxic

Insensitivity to payment schedule, wherein respondents do not adequately differentiate between a one-time payment and a series of payments may be an important, but often overlooked factor in the design, interpretation, and use of contingent valuation studies. Several contingent valuation experiments involving a familiar private good and a less familiar environmental commodity indicate that although respondents distinguished between lump sum and periodic payment schedules, implicit discount rates were very high, suggesting that sensitivity to payment schedule is an important subject for further study.

Three conjoint models—a traditional ratings model, a ratings difference specification, and a binary response model—were used to value groundwater protection program alternatives. The last, which is virtually identical to a dichotomous choice contingent valuation specification, produced the smallest value estimates. This suggests that the conjoint model is very sensitive to model specification and that traditional conjoint models may overestimate economic value because many respondents are not in the market for the commodity being valued.

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.

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are an important source of contamination of groundwater supplies in Massachusetts and many parts of the United States. One local response is to require sewering in wellhead protection areas as an easily enforceable policy designed to reduce the probability of VOC contamination of groundwater. Data were collected for 238 wellhead protection areas in Massachusetts on VOC contamination levels and the sewered and unsewered land uses in those aquifer recharge areas. Logistic regression procedures were used to see whether sewering had any statistical effect on likelihood of contamination of well water. The results provided limited, but not overpowering, support for the idea that requiring commercial and industrial land uses to use sewers would reduce the chance of VOC contamination.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are becoming increasingly important to virtually all of the natural and social sciences. Applied economists will find that GIS can make valuable contributions to many of the problems with which they are concerned. Moreover, a great deal of the science behind GIS technology would benefit from the contributions of applied economists. This paper presents some initial suggestions for the ways in which GIS may be important to economics and the GIS related issues concerning which applied economists could provide useful insights.

A linear programming model of greenhouse decisions based on expected profit maximization is solved and these results are compared with two other sets of results. One set is the generation of non-inferior solutions based on labor savings and expected profit considerations. The other is a set of nearly optimal solutions generated by the HSJ procedure. It is argued that for greenhouse operators typical of Massachusetts, the information contained in the nearly optimal and non-inferior solutions may be worth much more than the ‘optimal’ solution alone.

Opaluch and Just reported the top 20 departments in pages per faculty of articles in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics for the five year period 1968–1972. To determine how much has changed and how much has not during the intervening two decades, the analysis was repeated for the five year period 1988–1992. Some things seem not to change. University of California, Berkeley, remains at the pinnacle twenty years later. And 13 of the top 20 departments two decades ago, remain there during the 1988–1992 period. But seven did change, and the most notable aspect is that the number of Northeast departments in the top 20 rose from two to five.

ABSTRACT: Little is known about how different types of municipal water rate structures influence residential water use. Conventional wisdom suggests that increasing block rate structures promote conservation, but analysis of data from 85 Massachusetts communities does not support this view.

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.

This paper identifies some of the main determinants of early enrollment in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC). With data from Massachusetts, a binary choice model was used to determine why some women join the program in the first, versus the second or third, trimesters of pregnancy. Several studies have demonstrated that nutritional supplementation of the mother during pregnancy tends to increase fetal growth rates and reduce perinatal and postnatal mortality. Moreover, success in reducing adverse birth outcomes has been shown to be superior if nutritional supplementation begins early in pregnancy. We conclude that the likelihood of early enrollment can be enhanced by changes in local clinic operations.