Quasi-experimental and experimental approaches to environmental economics

By Michael Greenstone, Ted Gayer. 2009

295 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper argues that an increased application of quasi-experimental and experimental techniques will improve understanding about core environmental economics questions. This argument is supported by a review of the limitations of associational evidence in assessing causal hypotheses. The paper also discusses the benefits of experiments and quasi-experiments, outlines some quasi-experimental methods, and highlights threats to their validity. It then illustrates the quasi-experimental method by assessing the validity of a quasi-experiment that aims to estimate the impact of the Endangered Species Act on property markets in North Carolina. The paper's larger argument is that greater application of experimental and quasi-experimental techniques can identify efficient policies that increase social welfare.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f5f4ce41ebbb0a0980a5033c236d3431dde2d1e0

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In General Decision Sciences

Citations in the corpus

Are Travelers Willing to Pay a Premium to Stay at a “Green” Hotel? Evidence from an Internal Meta-Analysis of Hedonic Price Premia (2010, background): “, Greenstone and Gayer 2009). Kiel and Zabel (1999) investigate the validity of this assumption by comparing actual sale prices to self-reported values.”
Show Me the Money: Do Payments Supply Environmental Services in Developing Countries? (2010, background): “The lack of a more substantial literature on PES evaluations reflects the fact that the practice of impact evaluation is relatively new to conservation policy (Greenstone and Gayer 2009).”
How much green for the buck? Estimating additional and windfall effects of French agro-environmental schemes by DID-matching (2010, background): “As Greenstone and Gayer [17] argue, more work applying modern methods of causal inference to environmental economics is needed.”
Quasi-Experiments and Hedonic Property Value Methods (2009, unknown): “Usually, the researcher is left to argue heuristically that their instrument is exogenous.15 see Greenstone and Gayer (2007) for a more descriptive discussion of iv methods and their use in quasiexperimental settings.”
The Evidence Base for Environmental and Socioeconomic Impacts of “Sustainable” Certification (2010, unknown): “Three principal approaches to constructing a credible counterfactual have been used (Ferraro 2009; Greenstone and Gayer 2007; Ferraro and Pattanayak 2006; Frondel and Schmidt”
Values in the Wind: A Hedonic Analysis of Wind Power Facilities (2012, background): “9% of property owners would benefit directly from easement payments made by the developers.(7) Easement payments are negotiated with individual land owners and are not publically available so the magnitude and actual economic benefit to these property owners was not quantified.”
Heterogeneous treatment effects and mechanisms in information-based environmental policies: Evidence from a large-scale field experiment (2013, background): “A new literature uses randomized controlled trials, which are rare in environmental economics (Greenstone and Gayer, 2009), to test the impacts of non-pecuniary, norm-based messages on environmental outcomes such as energy use (e.g., Ayres et al., 2009; Yoeli, 2009; Allcott, 2012; Costa and Kahn,…”
Evaluation of biodiversity policy instruments: what works and what doesn't? (2012, background): “In econometric terms, non-random assignment induces a correlation between the policy variable (the treatment) and the error term in a regression equation, with the direction of the bias depending on the sign of the correlation between them (Greenstone and Gayer, 2009).”