Tuesday, September 7, 2010

standards

Today in class I mentioned ambient air quality standards under the Clean Air Act.
Click here to view the standards.
Basic CAA info here.

We also talked about CAFE standards.
Read about those here and here.

Here's a simple example illustrating the Coase Theorem (published in 1960 by the way) from Thayer Watkins at San Jose State.

More on Coase here and an interesting discussion at Freakonomics from '07.







2 comments:

Loren Albertson said...

The link you posted about the Coase theorem was helpful, but I still don't think the Coase theorem is a reliable method to solving the externality problem. Its not always possible to assign property rights, especially when dealing with non point source pollution. Pigou's method seems to be more effect for the majority of these types of markets.

Dr. Peter Schuhmann said...

Loren is correct in noting that Coase really only works in certain situations.

The Coase solution is appealing to some because the role of government is limited and property rights are promoted.

Can anyone think of an environmental problem where Coase might work best?