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Three Essays On Environmental Economics And International Trade, Patrick Mclaughlin

All Dissertations

ABSTRACT This dissertation addresses the broad topic of appropriate metrics, proxies, and estimation methods in environmental economics and international trade research, presented as three separate studies. The first, entitled, 'Something in the Water? Testing for Groundwater Quality Information in the Housing Market,' examines how informed real estate markets are with respect to groundwater quality by using a couple of different proxies for groundwater quality in a hedonic framework. This research topic has potentially suffered from imperfect proxies and incomplete information, which I test. In the second, entitled, 'Do Economic Integration Agreements Actually Work? Issues in Understanding the Causes and Consequences …