Clemson University TigerPrints All Dissertations Dissertations 5-2008 Three Essays on Environmental Economics and International Trade Patrick Mclaughlin Clemson University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations Part of the Economics Commons Recommended Citation Mclaughlin, Patrick, "Three Essays on Environmental Economics and International Trade" (2008). All Dissertations. 204. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/204 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations at TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THREE ESSAYS ON ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of Clemson University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Applied Economics by Patrick Arthur McLaughlin May 2008 Accepted by: Daniel Benjamin, Committee Chair Scott Baier Bentley Coffey Robert Tollison 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 of the Growth in Regionalism,” I address a topic in international trade that has consistently suffered from endogeneity biases in estimations: the effect of economic integration agreements on bilateral trade flows.