The Measurement of Environmental and Resource Values: Theory and Methods

Freeman's "The Benefits of Environmental Improvement: Theory and Practice", published in 1979, examined the relationship between benefits and environmental decision-making and the problems involved in measuring the values of environmental changes. The years following the publication of this study have seen a virtual explosion of new theoretical developments and empirical applications in resource and environmental valuation. This work presents a comprehensive treatment of benefit measurement that includes entirely reworked analyses of such topics as the contingent valuation technique, valuing improved health, property value models, and the travel cost approach. New topics include intertemporal welfare measures, the use of discrete choice models, the valuation of risk changes, hedonic wage models, non-use values, and measurement of the cost of environmental policies. "The Measurement of Environmental and Resource Values" aims to provide an introduction to the principal methods and techniques of resource and environmental valuation to professional economists and graduate students who are not directly engaged in the field. Practitioners in the field should find the work an up-do-date reference on recent developments in the theory and methods underlying the practice of resource valuation.

A. Myrick Freeman III is research professor of economics at Bowdoin College and a former senior fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF).