Environmental Economics Research Paper- feature Villanova Professor Chris Jeffords

 

Environmental Economics:

Theory, Rights, and Policy

Nicholas Djoulia

March 2026

Abstract

This paper will provide an overview and analysis of environmental economics, an interdisciplinary field of economics, with a focus on the relationship among markets, policy, and human rights. Expanding on research by economist Chris Jeffords, the paper argues that standard, more traditional economic models are insufficient to describe the issues facing society, failing to recognize equity constraints, demographic disparities, and the humanity that defines us at our core. This argument is expanded on throughout the paper through the breakdown of five interconnected substructures: the market failure theory and its impact on policy; the Kuznets Curve, along with the Jeffords and Thompson minimum consumption modification; the global record on environmental rights constitutionally and the difference between the promises legal frameworks and the real-world outcomes; the extent of environmental concern and the impact of pollution; and the theoretical economic viewpoint vs the questionable environmental politics of congestion pricing. This argument holds that a balance between economic objectives and environmental protection is key to a healthy and sustainable future. However, the policy implications of this cooperation, from carbon taxes to congestion pricing, can be expected to face significant challenges despite the proposed benefits.

1. Introduction

In June 2024, New York City’s congestion pricing program, revolutionary with its restrictions on traffic entering Manhattan, was the first of its kind in the US. Weeks before its official implementation, an executive order halted it. The federal government's rationale was clear: equity. The fear was that the toll would put unnecessary financial strain on out-of-borough commuters and local businesses. In contrast, congestion pricing had been justified using the reverse logic, reasoning that improved air quality through increased use of public transportation would lead to higher economic output for New Yorkers by clearing roadways for a transit system strained by traffic. 

This scenario reflects a central focus of environmental economics: the gap between economic theory and its intentions, and what the policy will deliver in practice. That gap between the legalities and the outcomes in reality, between economic efficiency and demographic equity, is the question of focus in this analysis.

Professor Chris Jeffords's research, drawing on over a decade of experience, demonstrates that economic models and tools can only be pushed so far theoretically before inevitably underperforming in practice on topics such as human rights, inequality, and institutional capacity. His finding that constitutional environmental rights foster positive outcomes across demographics, while supported by functioning institutions and enforcement. This connects to the congestion pricing paradox, with the outcome being heavily dependent on enforcement and implementation.

The paper’s central claim is that environmental economics yields the best results when it incorporates rights, equity, and institutional capacity into strict economics, thereby avoiding political trepidation. A carbon tax without demographic concern will fail politically; a constitutional provision without proper enforcement will fail in real-world scenarios; a congestion toll without proper alternatives for consumers will fail in both ways. In each scenario, the theoretical economics checks out, but the policy implementation is incomplete.

2. Foundations of Environmental Economics: Externalities, Instruments, and Gaps

1. Externalities and the Corrective Policy Toolkit

The foundational perspective of environmental economics is that markets fail to account for and protect the environment because the emissions and waste they create impose a burden not on the polluter but on the consumer and the general public. This negative impact was classified as an externality, a cost bearing on third parties, by Pigou (1920) through his conceptualization of the Pigouivan Tax. This “tax” is a corrective measure designed to charge the polluter the amount equal to the social cost they burden on society, in numerical form. Some confuse this with an externality itself, while it is really a mechanism that aims to correct it. This social cost applies to carbon emissions, one of the most contentious environmental and societal issues of the last century, which originated primarily from the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century. Prices range from under $20 to over $200 per ton, depending on location and damage. Strictly economic changes to the industry cannot resolve this issue: policy has to be implemented from the top down.

Whether at the national, state, or local level, three policy families are involved in effecting change. Command-and-control regulations set standards across the board. An example of this would be the Clean Air Act of 1963 (updated in 1970), which established government mandates for companies regarding pollution and emissions. With this kind of policy, measures are enforceable, however, not cost-effective for all firms, and there is no incentive for firms to follow them. This could lead to economic risks, such as a slowdown of revenue if firms cannot achieve positive margins under the policy. Price-based instruments, such as a tax or a subsidy, are more cost-effective because they set a price for a specific element of a product in an industry, while allowing flexibility by imposing a tax for non-compliance.

An example would be the federal government setting a $ 50-per-ton price for CO2 emissions when emissions exceed a certain threshold. Some firms will pay the tax if they deem it cost-effective, while others will stay below the set emissions limit to avoid the tax. This type of policy still gives firms breathing room economically, while promoting an environmentally friendly agenda. Lastly, Information-based instruments work by providing both people with better information on current environmental issues, so they can make sound financial and societal decisions. For example, the Emergency Planning, and Community Right-to-Know Act of 1986 mandated that factories and industrial facilities publicly report the amount of toxic material they were releasing into the environment, whether into water, air, or land. This is a way to protect the public from the environmental abuses of industry, making businesses provide the public with better information. An important barrier to recognize with this policy is consumer ignorance and the public's overall willingness to accept the information provided to them, rather than a direct externality they face. In general, these policies aim to correct environmental market failures by influencing the behavior of both businesses and the public, leading to better outcomes for society, both socially and environmentally.

2. The Economics-Policy Gap

In terms of a strict economic focus, the efficient policy is rarely the politically sound one. Three structural gaps in our system help examine this: losers in markets and politics organize and band together to combat winners in both fields (political economy); economically optimal, or efficient policies impose costs unequally on the economically and politically disadvantaged, creating friction in society even when welfare and governmental programs aid the aggregate (distributional conflict); and enforcement capacity of policy by governments varies dramatically across nations (implementation capacity). These political-economy interactions are analyzed throughout Jeffords’ research.

3. Public Goods, the Commons, and Private Bargaining

Public goods theory explains that some goods and services are not provided by the free market, which forces governments to step in to provide them, such as welfare. This theory explains why clean air and climate stability cannot be adequately supplied by markets in a capitalist society: since these goods are non-rival (an individual’s consumption doesn’t decrease another’s consumption). Non-excludable (no individual can be prevented from benefiting from the good), individuals can reap the benefits without contributing, echoing the classic free rider problem in our society. This leads markets to be apprehensive about supporting certain sectors of society, such as clean air and the broader protection of our environment. Hardin (1968) examined this dynamic in “The Tragedy of the Commons,” arguing that individuals utilizing shared resources will eventually in their own self-interest, deplete the community’s resources without governmental regulation. Economist Elinor Ostrom challenged this stance through her work on common-pool resources, providing strong support for the argument that the free-rider problem is not inevitable and that the government is not always necessary to foster effective institutions, focusing on the concept of self-governance under the right circumstances. This concept links directly to Jefford’s work, in his finding that constitutional rights require effective institutions to support their provisions. Similarly, Economist Ronald Coase argued that private parties can conduct business and financial transactions (private bargaining) when property rights are defined and transaction costs are low. Unfortunately, this concept often does not hold because the aforementioned conditions are absent in real-world environmental markets.

III. The Environmental Kuznets Curve and Its Limits

1. The Inverted-U Hypothesis

The Environmental Kuznets Curve, abbreviated EKC and adapting Kuznets’ (1955) work, analyzes the relationship between per capita income and environmental degradation: As a country’s income rises, environmental consequences worsen, then improve, forming a U-shaped graph. Preindustrial nations have worsened their environmental positioning, then peaked during the industrial period, and declined on the post-industrial, “wealthy” side of the graph. Grossman and Krueger (1991) provided fundamental support for this pattern: they found that sulfur dioxide (classified by the EPA as one of the six criteria air pollutants) and particulate matter concentrations peaked and then declined near average per capita income levels of around $ 4,500 (in 1985 dollars). This finding showed a quantifiable turning point in which environmental development is a byproduct of further economic development, supporting the EKC hypothesis with empirical, observable data rather than relying solely on theory.

However, this hypothesis is more fragile in practice than it might appear. CO2 emissions, for example, do not follow the inverted-U pattern across multiple income ranges, in part because wealthy nations have not curbed emissions and cleaned up “dirty” production. At the center of the graph, at the apex, estimates vary across many studies, and, in combination with a lack of a tangible mechanism connecting growing wealth to environmental progress, this “simple” theory proves structurally questionable.

2. The Minimum Consumption Floor

Jeffords and Thompson (2019) introduce a theoretical modification, in this case an alteration to the EKC model’s assumptions, by establishing a minimum consumption requirement for economic models. These requirements established that a baseline level of consumption is necessary for households to factor environmental concerns into their financials. Below this baseline, environmental concerns are theoretically not on households' financial docket, with their preferences for these issues below the effective societal demand. On the other hand, above the baseline, environmental concern is economically feasible, enabling households to meet the societal demand for environmental causes. The overall result is that the EKC’s apex is further to the left in practice than in theory due to environmental improvement arriving earlier and being mixed with the minimum baseline environmental policy. 

The policy implication, a direct application of the previously discussed EKC, challenges the “grow first, clean later” logic because distributional policies (policies involving the redistribution of income from rich to poor) enable the poor to meet a baseline of financial stability, not accomplished through welfare programs, but through environmental policy. Environmental policy has been shown to enhance working and living conditions by lowering emissions and reducing congestion, leading to better job opportunities and a higher quality of life. To support this environmental policy and progress, economic growth must be at a certain sustainable level, along with institutional capacity to uphold that progress.

IV. Constitutional Environmental Rights: Law, Data, and Outcomes

1. The Global Spread of CERs

Fewer than 10 nations around the globe had explicitly stated constitutional provisions supporting environmental rights in 1970, but by the early 2020s, nearly 100 nations had adopted environmental rights into their constitutional framework. These constitutional rights, abbreviated as i, include non-quantitative and tangible measures, such as guaranteeing the right to clean air and water, and measures maintaining a nation's environment, as well as procedural measures, such as altering the nation’s justice system to accommodate environmental concerns.

Jeffords's (2021) quantitative analysis in Ecological Economics found that nations with CERs (Constitutional Environmental Rights) achieve substantially higher levels of clean water, sanitation, and emissions reduction than nations that lack them. Precisely, Jeffords’ cross-national analysis (regression) uses outcome variables (designed to capture the results of an intervention), including access to sanitation and water sources and decreased CO2 emissions, and finds strong statistical significance (high accuracy, not due to error) between CER adoption and material gains in environmental conditions. However, nations with CERs that have the institutional capacity to sustain them are the ones that achieve the greatest levels of environmental progress, not just having the “improvements” on paper. A high-quality, active judicial system, combined with civil society and the rule of law, helps enforce CERs. On the other hand, nations with lower income and structural capacity, even with the same constitutional provision, achieve minimal progress.

2. The Implementation Gap

Gellers and Jeffords (2021) study the aforementioned implementation gap, determining that it is a consistent, national shortfall between constitutional rights and what governments can enforce compliance with these rights. Failures in Monitoring, without the data capacity to assess environmental compliance and enforcement; with no formal capabilities to compel compliance or participation; with no practical judicial capabilities to maintain compliance; a compliance-oriented economy, with wealthy elites polluting and resisting the institutions that attempt to restrict their poor environmental behavior. 

Geller's and Jeffords analysis of the Asia-Pacific region confirms that this pattern, the gap in implementation, is not just the outcome of a legal problem, but a combination of problems stemming from failure of economic information distribution, transaction costs, and rent-seeking dynamics. With that being said, the implementation gap is not only a systemic legal issue but also a major economic challenge.

V. Environmental Inequality: Concern, Burden, and Distribution

1. Environmental Concern as a Luxury Good

Jeffords, Thompson, and Gwinn (2019) used Google Trends data to show that wealthier US households use the internet to research environmental issues much more often than lower-income households. This has led economists to consider environmental concern a luxury, with rising income equating to more access to the means to perpetuate environmental change. Using a similar perspective, the political economy implications reason that policy will reflect the wishes of those with the most financial means, the elite. And, as a result, this policy will reflect the wishes and voices of those who will be least likely to face environmental hardship, such as the negative effects of pollution, through the wealthy’s innate access to better living conditions and economic opportunities.

2. Unequal Burdens and Revenue Redistribution

The environmental justice academic community confirms a fundamental inequity: minority and low-income households bear pollution and environmental consequences disproportionately. For example, when it comes to particulate matter exposure, respiratory and cardiovascular disease, mortality rates, and cognitive decline in children can be traced back to the inability to avoid polluted environments. And the truly unfortunate phenomenon is that this harm compounds across generations, affecting entire communities for many years into the future.

Environmental policy elements, at times, fail to help communities facing compounded inequalities. For example, carbon taxes, through their regressive structure, burden many because lower-income households spend a larger share of their income on energy than wealthier households do, facing rates that undermine their financial integrity on a broad scale, such as jeopardizing their ability to pay for other essentials like food and clothing. To correct this, a revenue design, where a fee-and-dividend revenue return works as a uniform lump sum, can be progressive (tax rate increases with income) in net terms, but this could force distributional analysis to occur to survey policy before widespread implementation, not later on, to avoid harming the people and communities the policy was meant to benefit.

VI. Congestion Pricing: Economic Theory and Political Reality

1. The Congestion Externality and the Optimal Toll

Ever since their creation, roads and highway systems have been a common-pool resource, used without restriction by society. In this system, drivers interact in a congested network that experiences internal delays, with a couple of road-goers causing a traffic backlog without experiencing it themselves (e.g., slowing down in the fast lane). This is called the congestion externality. In these situations, Pigouvian theory can be applied, concluding that each driver emits a marginal external cost to the system they drive in and should be charged for it. Walters (1961) and Vickrey (1969)-in separate papers-created a formal calculation for this charge, loosely known as a “toll” fee (what it ideally should be). AC(q) is defined as the average trip cost at traffic amount q, yielding a marginal societal cost:

MSC(q) = AC(q) + q × [dAC/dq]

The second term, (q[dAC/dq]), is an externality, the cost that falls on another person that typically goes unaccounted for, representing the additional delay per driver multiplied by the number of drivers present in the system (the road). The optimal toll in a perfect world is set equal to the aforementioned cost you impose on others, but is calculated using the target traffic level (a lower, more optimal level of congestion, the level once the toll has taken effect), not today’s traffic level. The Bureau of Public Roads aids in calculating the cost you impose by measuring how travel time rises with traffic volume, (dAC/dq):

dAC/dq=Travel time = Free-flow time × [1 + 0.15 × (volume/capacity)^4]

In the aforementioned equation, the fourth-power relationship indicates that the cost you impose on others rises steeply near the system's maximum capacity, so small reductions in the volume of cars on congested roads greatly reduce travel time for drivers. Vickrey’s model extends the aforementioned model to a dynamic setting: a toll that accounts for time-varying updates to the toll price over time, accurately charging drivers for the cost they impose on the system. For example, Singapore’s ERP2 system demonstrates this in practice by updating tolls every 30 minutes based on changing road conditions (e.g., traffic volume). Further examples of congestion pricing initiatives will be presented in the next section.

2. Global Evidence: London, Stockholm, Singapore, New York

The international record on congestion pricing is clearly correlated with efficiency gains in markets. London’s 2003 Congestion Charge reduced London traffic by 15-20%, and reduced travel time by 30%, while generating over £130 million in annual revenue for England’s transit system. In Stockholm, a time-varying tax, permanent since 2007, reduced inner-city traffic by 20-25% and CO2 emissions by about 10%. Taken together, Eliasson’s welfare analysis (2009) affirms that net social benefits are positive after accounting for administrative costs, indicating a true positive impact on communities from congestion pricing.

Back to the Singapore example, the Singapore ERP, created in 1975, shows that dynamic congestion pricing can operate without political interference when integrated with traffic policy. Through the implementation of three elements: variable tolls that readjust in real-time, reinvestment in public transit alternatives, including a push for electric options, and parking policies that help support pricing signals in legislation. This multi-pronged approach to time-varying congestion pricing prevented political backlash that would typically topple single-pronged initiatives. 

In New York, their 2024 Program, a $9 base toll that projected $1 billion in annual revenue for the MTA, was halted by an executive order after years of legislative approval and environmental review. The pause itself signals that the implementation gap between congestion pricing and environmental policy is widespread and highly systemic. Jeffords identified this same trend with constitutional environmental rights, which suffer politically even with broad societal support.

3. Regressivity, Revenue, and Environmental Co-Benefits

Regarding the distribution of taxes, from rich to poor, there has been a conflict between regressive and flat tax rates. The regressive argument is that a flat toll takes a larger share of income from lower-income drivers; however, a full welfare analysis shows this argument is outweighed, though it remains financially valid. Four corrections, with examples of this stance, need to be discussed: 

First, congestion itself, when viewed from the regressive perspective, doesn’t automatically harm low income bus riders disproportionately compared to wealthier riders. With London’s congestion charge in 2003, which critics argued was a regressive toll (individual drivers were forced to pay increased tolls compared to before the implementation),, failed to account for the fact that most low-income people were traveling on buses. So the 30% decrease in travel time directly benefited low-income travelers. 

Second, Parry and Small’s (2009) research shows that when toll revenue increases and is reinvested in public transit, the result can be progressive overall in net terms. With the initial toll payment being regressive, targeting individual drivers, but then expanded bus services, rail services, with reduced fares for lower-income riders on these services, the policy disproportionately benefits lower-income households who utilize transit more than wealthier travelers.

Third, peak travel-time drivers in business districts skew congestion data for higher-income demographics from a regressive standpoint. The toll data, with a heavy emphasis on congestion caused by drivers in these districts, show that the more expensive toll zone falls within this area, which predominantly impacts wealthier drivers. This means that lower-income drivers bear less of the toll burden because they do not use this zone for work, weakening the regressive argument.

Fourth, Goulder’s (1995) framework shows that toll revenue can replace inefficient and distortionary labor taxes (which cause significant economic waste), thereby fostering economy-wide efficiency gains. If toll revenue from congestion pricing allows governments to lower income taxes, the distributional impact can favor lower-income households even if the toll appears regressive by itself (through lightening the tax burden for lower-income earners).

4. Political Economy: Why Theory Outpaces Adoption

Sixty-plus years of economic thought have culminated in a few operational schemes for congestion pricing from a global perspective. The concept of loss aversion (the pain of loss hurts greater than the benefit of winning), examined by Kahneman and Tversky (1979), explains this; when drivers experience the toll on a journey that was previously free, concentrated opposition arises politically and societally, from taxi fleets, trucking unions, and parking policy advocates. This is how change in the political economy can be enacted. Also, diffusionary benefits stemming from the additional toll, such as faster travel and cleaner air, are delayed and not concentrated, leading to further opposition towards the implemented tolls.

These ideas map onto the luxury-good concept: voice in politics is distributed across different income classes, not through environmental concern/need. For example, Stockholm’s success shows what it takes for congestion pricing to remain politically relevant: let the population experience congestion pricing before a formal vote, ensure that stable, accessible transit alternatives are in place, and clearly show how the additional revenue will be allocated. On the other hand, New York’s last-minute cancellation of its congestion policy shows that when the aforementioned steps are not followed and when politics is not managed carefully, trust and support for congestion pricing can erode significantly.

The failure of New York’s congestion pricing, politically, can be understood further through the lens of Jeffords’ research. The minimum consumption threshold (see section III) examined by Jeffords and Thompson (2019) indicates that households below or near the consumption minimum cannot afford to take environmental concerns into political consideration, as they are financially constrained from doing so. Yet it was the outer-borough commuters, not as wealthy as the inner-borough commuters (in Manhattan), whose political pressure helped halt the congestion pricing initiative. At the same time, the luxury-good findings from Jeffords, Thompson, and Gwinn (2019) forecast that the wealthier population would produce the strongest political opposition to congestion pricing, while also being the population that faces the least environmental harm from pollution. This lopsided political power structure creates an environment in which populations that win gain the most and lack the political resources necessary to foster change. The populations that would be least affected have the greatest impact and thus do not foster change. This is what we can call a cross-cutting dynamic, with the minimum consumption requirement supported by the lower-income population. At the same time, the luxury-goods phenomenon keeps political power in the hands of the least needy, helping to explain why congestion pricing is politically ineffective despite its positive environmental and economically efficient outcomes.

VII. International Dimensions: Development Finance and Environmental Conditions

1. China’s Development Finance in Africa

Gellers and Jeffords (2019) explore the African continent’s environmental situation. They pondered whether environmental conditions in African countries influence where China chooses to invest on the continent through its 21st Century “Belt and Road” initiative. The analysis of China’s investment choices has shown that pollution levels, resource availability, and ecological circumstances are important indicators in determining where China invests. These concerns persist even after addressing economic and political issues. Since it is clear that China pays attention to environmental concerns, this challenges the assumption that environmental factors are secondary to commercial motivations and economic concerns, and that they are merely a consequence of the decision-making process rather than a factor in it.

2. Green Finance and the Evolving Landscape

Building on the aforementioned analysis of China’s investment choices, China has adopted the Green Bond Standards and the safeguards established by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to enhance its environmental profile further. Whether these commitments have tangible effects on China’s environmental profile remains undetermined, and Gellers and Jeffords' framework will help investigate this issue further in the future. 

VIII. Synthesis: Towards Rights-Integration

1. Three Recurring Structure Failures 

Three structural failures of Environmental Economics recur in every domain this paper has covered. Firstly, the market pricing failure: pollution expenses are imparted on parties and individuals that are not involved with the production of the pollution, and no mechanism in the present-day market can correct this without intervention. The implementation failure: legal and well-designed policies often fail to produce their intended results because opponents of the policy concentrate and diffuse the benefits (see section VI for more detail). This can create distributional burdens that lead to widespread political resistance and weaken enforcement capacity. Jeffords explores and documents this phenomenon in his investigation of constitutional rights, and New York also documents it in its congestion pricing. The equity failure: standard environmental-economic models attempt to optimize welfare. At the same time, lower-income populations have the least impactful political voice and bear the greatest environmental burdens in a system that is supposed to aid them. 

2. Rights, Equity, and Institutional Capacity

The paper’s central argument is that environmental economics yields better analysis and outcomes for society when rights, equity, and institutional capacity arise internally within the model rather than from external political motivations. Jeffords and Thompson’s EKC modification demonstrates this concept in context: the EKC trajectory is not fully determined or fixed by income; rather, it combines income information with distributional policy and rights infrastructure. Jeffords also worked on constitutional rights research that further demonstrated this through a governance lens: institutional capacity can not just be in a constitutional text alone, but a cause of outcomes in practice through implementation and governmental support.

The analysis of congestion pricing is also demonstrated in a policy context: evaluating pricing using Pigouvian theory alone has overestimated policy adoption and underestimated political fragility. This lesson is generalized across carbon pricing and protected area policy: the path from purely economic analysis (theoretical) to lasting policy outcomes through political economy, distributional initiatives, and institutional capacity.

IX. Conclusion

Environmental economics is most useful not for its techniques for market analysis and the identification of market inefficiencies, but as a framework for understanding situations that enable environmental progress to be politically feasible and institutionally durable for years to come. Jeffords’ research and works have modeled what the field aims to look like: quantitative rigor in conjunction with human rights implementation; cutting the notion that growth is necessary but not sufficient for change; documentation of implementation gap to better identify while policy initiatives halt; and a political economy examination for why populations most affected environmental degradation are distributionally harmed and underrepresented by systems that serve to protect them. 

Collectively, Jeffords’ works demonstrate that the implementation gap is not politically secondhand to accurate economic analysis: it is instead a central economic concern of environmental policy. The minimum consumption threshold determines who can afford environmental action and advocacy, the luxury-good concept determines who is effectively heard (politically and financially), and the institutional capacity concept determines whether environmental rights on paper (CERs or others) can be successfully implemented and sustained in tangible outcomes. Environmental economics, as presented in this paper, must continue to model the aforementioned implementation constraints with the same tenacity it has shown in addressing externality concerns and taxation (Pigouvian). The field's potential in analyzing and solving societal issues is not the question; rather, it is the field’s ability to bind theory and lasting policy, which Jeffords’ work emphasizes to a large extent.

Future directions for environmental economics include cross regional comparisons of congestion pricing implementations that build on Jeffords’ comparative rights framework to analysis policy; behavioral research on how political and societal framing of issues greatly affects public support for pricing initiatives; mixed-methods work in combination with cross-national quantitative work with qualitative case studies to accurately identify the practical means of converting constitutional rights on paper into real-world outcomes; and updated analysis of Chinese development and investment profile using the Gellers and Jeffords framework to assess whether green finance promises have resulted in measurable environmental improvements. The tools that can aid this-Pigouvian taxes, cap-and-trade, constitutional rights, congestion pricing-are well developed and are currently in the works politically around the world. The challenge Jeffords’ work highlights is sustaining the effectiveness of these tools, and their outcomes, in the political, institutional, and distributional landscapes that actual societies inhabit.

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