2009 Publication of Enduring Quality Award
The selection committee for the Publication of Enduring Quality Award for this year included Douglass Shaw, chair (Texas A&M University), Cathy Kling (Iowa State University), and Ray Palmquist (North Carolina State University). After much careful deliberation, the committee selected the winning paper for 2009.
The 2009 Award for Publication of Enduring Quality has been awarded to:
Kathleen Segerson
for her 1988 paper
“Uncertainty and Incentives for Nonpoint Pollution Control”
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Volume 15: 87-98
This award was presented at the AERE Annual Luncheon Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia on January 4, 2010. The following remarks were given by Cathy Kling:
I am pleased to present the 2009 award for the Publication of Enduring Quality to Kathleen Segerson for her 1988 paper, “Uncertainty and Incentives for Nonpoint Pollution Control,” which was published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Volume 15: 87-98.
When first notified, Dr. Segerson refused the award, for fear of conflict of interest concerns considering that she is currently AERE president. The committee gave her a revise and resubmit. We insisted she accept—this is not the first time this paper has been nominated and, given that there are no AERE bylaws restricting the recipient of this award, it seemed mightily unfair that she should be penalized for her public service.
As to the importance of the paper, according to the EPA, nonpoint source pollution continues to be the largest remaining source of water quality problems in the nation and is an issue that economists have struggled with for many years. Dr. Segerson’s paper was the first to incorporate the fundamental characteristics of nonpoint source pollution into a formal theoretical model to study efficient tax schemes, specifically recognizing that individual emissions and abatement levels cannot be observed or easily monitored. Because the effect of emissions on ambient concentrations is uncertain due to weather and other random variables, the tie between ambient concentrations and individual emissions from any single polluter cannot be established. Therefore, abatement efforts need to be viewed as shifting the probability distribution rather than being deterministic.
Using these characteristics, Dr. Segerson modeled and derived the conditions for efficient tax and subsidy schemes in both the short and long run. Her research finds the initially somewhat counterintuitive result that with multiple polluters under risk, the optimal tax or subsidy has each polluter paying the full marginal benefit of a reduction in ambient pollution. This result and the modeling structure she developed have contributed to improved understanding of the efficient design of policies to address nonpoint source pollution.
Evidence of the substantive impact that this paper has had within our profession is the 134 citations listed in the Web of Science. Please join me in thanking Dr. Segerson for this excellent contribution to our discipline.