LAUSR

ENVIRONMENTAL AND RESOURCE ECONOMICS is a diverse field, addressing a range of topics and research questions. However, many of these research questions are unified by the fact that they are inherently causal in nature. Understanding the causal impacts of policies and events is essential to the development of effective environmental policy. Consequently, research advances in all areas of environmental and resource economics depend critically on the appropriate evaluation of causal effects of competing treatments, exposures, and/or policies. Formal causal inference is crucial to assess these effects, whether the data come from experimental or observational studies, or a combination of both. Moreover, improved understanding of issues related to external validity is also immensely important. This includes better understanding of statistical issues related to the generalizability of results as well as uncovering behavioral mechanisms driving specific causal effects. There have been numerous methodological and applied contributions to the causal inference literature, especially over the last two decades. Many of these contributions have arisen within or been applied to topics concerning environmental and resource economics. Moreover, the unique setting of interest in studies within environmental and resource economics may give rise to underappreciated challenges when evaluating causal effects and investigating the mechanisms behind such effects. This special issue of the JAERE, entitled “Causal Inference in Environmental and Resource Economics: Challenges, Developments, and Applications,” contains studies from several areas of environmental and resource economics. Some of these studies provide methodological advances that ought to be of value to researchers in all areas, not just environmental and resource economics. The remainder apply recent advances in