Scholars@Duke
Lori Snyder Bennear

Lori Snyder Bennear

Professor of Environmental Economics and Policy
Environmental Social Systems
lori.bennear@duke.edu
Box 90328, Durham, NC 27708
Grainger Hall 5118, 9 Circuit Drive, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

Robert N. Stavins (1948–)

Chapter · January 1, 2024 Robert N. Stavins is a leading environmental economist whose research and policy engagement have shaped a generation of environmental policies. His work has been critical to the development and widespread use of market-based approaches to environmental pro ... Full text Cite

Does Information Disclosure Reduce Drinking Water Violations in the United States?

Journal Article Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists · May 1, 2023 The 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments required community water systems to disclose violations of drinking water standards to their customers in annual water quality reports. We explore the impact of three methods of disclosure on health-based drinkin ... Full text Cite

Energy Justice, Decarbonization, and the Clean Energy Transformation

Journal Article Annual Review of Resource Economics · January 1, 2022 Addressing climate change will require significant reductions in carbon emissions. Decarbonization will likely lead to increases in energy prices, which are regressive. Poorer households spend a higher percentage of income on energy and also have less acce ... Full text Cite

Institutional Roles and Goals for Retrospective Regulatory Analysis

Journal Article Journal of Benefit Cost Analysis · January 1, 2021 Despite repeated calls for retrospective regulatory review by every President since the 1970s, progress on implementing such reviews has been slow. We argue that part of the explanation for the slow progress to date stems from misalignment between the goal ... Full text Cite

Seafood prices reveal impacts of a major ecological disturbance.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · February 2017 Coastal hypoxia (dissolved oxygen ≤ 2 mg/L) is a growing problem worldwide that threatens marine ecosystem services, but little is known about economic effects on fisheries. Here, we provide evidence that hypoxia causes economic impacts on a major fishery. ... Full text Open Access Cite

Fleet behavior is responsive to a large-scale environmental disturbance: Hypoxia effects on the spatial dynamics of the northern Gulf of Mexico shrimp fishery.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2017 The northwestern Gulf of Mexico shelf experiences one of the largest seasonal hypoxic zones in the western hemisphere. Hypoxia (dissolved oxygen, DO ≤ 2.0 mg·L-1) is most severe from May to August during the height of the Gulf shrimp fishery, but its effec ... Full text Cite

Making sure the blue economy is green.

Journal Article Nature ecology & evolution · January 2017 Full text Cite

Recalibrating risk: Crises, learning, and regulatory change

Chapter · January 1, 2017 It is often observed that crisis events spur new regulation. An extensive literature focuses on the role of disasters, tragedies, scandals, shocks, and other untoward events in stimulating regulatory responses (Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Percival 1998; Ku ... Full text Cite

Introduction

Chapter · January 1, 2017 Crises punctuate our world. Their causes and consequences are woven through complex, interconnected social and technological systems. Consider these three recent events, each of which dramatically upended expectations about risk: • In the fall of 2008, the ... Full text Cite

Economic analysis, risk regulation, and the dynamics of policy regret

Chapter · January 1, 2017 In the wake of a crisis, a common refrain is “Why didn't we do more to prevent this terrible disaster?” All too frequently, ex-post analysis suggests that policy did not sufficiently account for extreme events, or that the level of regulation imposed or en ... Full text Cite

Spillovers in regional fisheries management: Do catch shares cause leakage?

Journal Article Land Economics · May 1, 2016 Regional councils manage U.S. fisheries. Fishermen can participate in fisheries managed by multiple councils, and effort controls in one region could lead to effort leakage into another. Theoretical modeling demonstrates that positive, negative, and no lea ... Full text Open Access Cite

Offshore oil and gas drilling: A review of regulatory regimes in the United States, United Kingdom, and Norway

Journal Article Review of Environmental Economics and Policy · January 1, 2015 Full text Cite

Evolution of households' responses to the groundwater arsenic crisis in Bangladesh: information on environmental health risks can have increasing behavioral impact over time.

Journal Article Environment and development economics · October 2014 A national campaign of well testing through 2003 enabled households in rural Bangladesh to switch, at least for drinking, from high-arsenic wells to neighboring lower-arsenic wells. We study the well-switching dynamics over time by re-interviewing, in 2008 ... Full text Cite

Promoting clean energy investment: An empirical analysis of property assessed clean energy

Journal Article Journal of Environmental Economics and Management · September 1, 2014 From 2008 to 2010 a handful of Property-Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs offered property-secured loans to homeowners for residential clean energy investments. This analysis uses difference-in-differences models and synthetic counterfactual models to ... Full text Cite

Spatial-dynamics of hypoxia and fisheries: The case of Gulf of Mexico brown shrimp

Journal Article Marine Resource Economics · May 2, 2014 We analyze the Gulf of Mexico brown shrimp fishery and the potential impacts of a large seasonal area of hypoxia (low dissolved oxygen) that coincides with the peak shrimp season. A spatial-dynamic bioeconomic simulation embeds three biological impacts on ... Full text Open Access Cite

Will a catch share for whales improve social welfare?

Journal Article Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · January 2014 We critique a proposal to use catch shares to manage transboundary wildlife resources with potentially high non-extractive values, and we focus on the case of whales. Because whales are impure public goods, a policy that fails to capture all nonmarket bene ... Full text Open Access Cite

Municipal rebate programs for environmental retrofits: An evaluation of additionality and cost-effectiveness

Journal Article Journal of Policy Analysis and Management · March 1, 2013 Featured Publication When policies incentivize voluntary activities that also take place in the absence of the incentive, it is critical to identify the additionality of the policy-that is, the degree to which the policy results in actions that would not have occurred otherwis ... Full text Cite

Flexible Environmental Regulation

Chapter · November 8, 2012 Featured Publication Cite

U.S. Shrimp Market Integration

Journal Article Marine Resource Economics · 2012 Open Access Cite

Impact of a randomized controlled trial in arsenic risk communication on household water-source choices in Bangladesh

Journal Article Journal of Environmental Economics and Management · 2012 Featured Publication We conducted a randomized controlled trial in rural Bangladesh to examine how household drinking-water choices were affected by two different messages about risk from naturally occurring groundwater arsenic. Households in both randomized treatment arms wer ... Full text Cite

Participation Incentives, Rebound Effects and the Cost-Effectiveness of Rebates for Water-Efficient Appliances

Journal Article Duke Environmental Economics Working Paper · November 22, 2011 Cite

Bright Lines, Risk Beliefs, and Risk Avoidance: Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in Bangladesh

Journal Article Economic Research Initiatives at Duke Working Paper · July 1, 2011 Cite

Information Disclosure and Drinking Water Quality

Journal Article Resources Magazine · October 2009 Cite

Sampling out: regulatory avoidance and the Total Coliform Rule.

Journal Article Environmental science & technology · July 2009 This paper investigates strategic noncompliance with the Total Coliform Rule (TCR) under the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act. The structure of the TCR provides incentives for some piped drinking water systems to avoid violations by taking additional water qua ... Full text Cite

What do we really know? The effect of reporting thresholds on inferences using environmental right‐to‐know data

Journal Article Regulation & Governance · September 2008 Featured Publication AbstractEnvironmental right‐to‐know regulations require regulated entities to publicly disclose measures of environmental performance but exempt entities from these disclosure requirements if they manufacture, process, or u ... Full text Cite

The impacts of the "right to know": Information disclosure and the violation of drinking water standards

Journal Article Journal of Environmental Economics and Management · January 1, 2008 Featured Publication Information disclosure regulations are increasingly common, but their effects on the behavior of regulated firms are unclear. The 1996 Amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act mandated that community drinking water suppliers issue to customers annual cons ... Full text Cite

Second-best theory and the use of multiple policy instruments

Journal Article Environmental and Resource Economics · May 1, 2007 In many cases policy makers employ multiple instruments to address a single environmental problem, but much of the economics literature on instrument choice focuses on comparing properties of single policy instruments. We argue that under a fairly broad se ... Full text Cite

Are management-based regulations effective? evidence from state pollution prevention programs

Journal Article Journal of Policy Analysis and Management · March 1, 2007 Featured Publication This paper evaluates a recent innovation in regulating risk called management-based regulation. Traditionally, risk regulation has either specified a particular means of achieving a risk-reduction goal or specified the goal and left the means of achieving ... Full text Cite

Are Management-Based Regulations Effective?

Journal Article Journal of Policy Analysis and Management · 2007 Cite

Using revealed preferences to infer environmental benefits: Evidence from recreational fishing licenses

Journal Article Journal of Regulatory Economics · September 1, 2005 We develop and apply a new method for estimating the economic benefits of an environmental amenity. The method is based upon the notion of estimating the derived demand for a privately traded option to utilize an open access good. In particular, the demand ... Full text Cite

Evaluating Environmental Policies

Scholarly Edition · November 1, 2004 Cite

"Every breath you take ... ": The demographics of toxic air releases in Southern California

Journal Article Economic Development Quarterly · January 1, 1999 In this article, the authors investigate the relationship between ethnicity and potential environmental hazards in the metropolitan Los Angeles area. Using a variety of techniques, including geographic information systems (GIS) mapping, univariate comparis ... Full text Cite

Is there environmental racism? The demographics of hazardous waste in Los Angeles County

Journal Article Social Science Quarterly · December 1, 1997 Objective. The "environmental justice" movement has suggested that demographic inequities characterize the location of hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities (TSDFs). While some researchers have found evidence that TSDFs are disproport ... Cite