Robert N. Stavins

August 1994

"Environment Regulation and the Competitiveness of U.S. Manufacturing"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

There is a heated debated among policy makers about the relationship between domestic environmental regulation and international competitiveness. The conventional wisdom among economists is that environmental regulations impose significant costs, slow productivity growth, and thereby hinder the ability of U.S. firms to compete in international markets. Under a more recent, revisionist view, environmental regulations are seen as being not only benign in their impacts on international competitiveness, but actually a net positive force driving private firms and the economy as a whole to become more efficient and competitive in international markets.

August, 1993

"Regulatory Review of Environmental Policy: The Potential Role of Health-Health Analysis"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

May, 1993

"Transaction Costs and the Performance of Markets for Pollution Control"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

March, 1992

"Greening of America's Taxes: Pollution Charges and Environmental Protection"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

December, 1991

"Economic Incentives for Environmental Protection: Integrating Theory and Practice"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

February 15, 1991

Evaluating the Relative Effectiveness of Economic Incentives and Direct Regulation for Environmental Protection: Impacts on the Diffusion of Technology

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

July, 1989

"Alternative Renewable Resources Strategies: A Simulation of Optimal Use"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

"Effects of Potential Land Development on Agricultural Land Prices"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

We conduct a national-scale study of the determinants of agricultural land values to better understand how current farmland prices are influenced by the potential for future land development. The theoretical basis for the empirical analysis is a spatial city model with stochastic returns to future land development. From the theoretical model, we derive an expression for the current price of agricultural land in terms of annual returns to agricultural production, the price of recently developed land parcels, and expressions involving model parameters that are represented in the empirical model by nonlinear functions of observed variables and parameters to be estimated.

"Next Generation of Market-Based Environmental Policies"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

We examine what will be required if market-based environmental policy instruments are to become a major force in U.S. environmental policy. These instruments are by no means a new policy idea. Indeed, over the past two decades they have held varying degrees of prominence on the environmental policy landscape, due, in part, to the fact that they are an attractive policy instrument in both theory and practice. But market-based instruments have failed to meet the great expectations that have often been set for them. They are currently only on the peripheries of environmental policy and, when they have been implemented, they frequently have not performed as predicted. Does this represent yet another breakdown between policy theory and policy practice? Was the effort to transform environmental regulations with these tools nothing more than quixotic tilting at windmills and is it time to return to more established -- if expensive -- policy mechanisms?

"Economic Incentives for Environmental Regulation"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

Environmental policies consits of two components: the identification of an overall goal and some means to achieve that goal. This essay considers the second component, the means- the "instruments"--of environmental policy, and it focuses, in particular, on the use of economic-incentive or market-based policy instruments.