Improving the quality of data used in environmental economics research

Valuing environmental goods through contingent valuation and through other survey techniques is difficult because of the lack of traditional markets for those goods. EPA provides leadership in overcoming these challenges, using focus groups, workshops, handbooks, and teams of distinguished economists to obtain more reliable economic data from the surveys. Agency economists have provided leadership in employing production economics tools to identify win-win approaches to solve pervasive and neglected environmental problems. In addition, we exploit the speed of sophisticated computers, building field runoff models into economic models and aggregating results from tens of thousands of field sites. These very flexible models provide much more credible, site-specific analyses than previous models, and they offer flexible and efficient remedies to support Total Maximum Daily Loads and other new programs.