By using ad hoc value transfer protocols, this paper offers a methodological contribution and provides accurate per hectare estimates of the economic value of some selected ecosystem services for all forest biomes in the world, identified following the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment taxonomy...

The empirical literature is very far from any consensus about the appropriate model for oil price forecasting that should be implemented. Relative to the previous literature, this paper is novel in several respects. First of all, we test and systematically evaluate the ability of several...

The relevance of oil in the world economy explains why considerable effort has been devoted to the development of different types of econometric models for oil price forecasting. Several specifications have been proposed in the economic literature. Some are based on financial theory and...

Cleaning up contaminated sites is one of the most important environmental policy priorities in many countries. Remediation of contaminated sites is attractive because it reduces risks to human health and ecological systems, and brings a host of potential social and economic benefits. Even when...

This paper provides an assessment of the economic value of the oceanographic services provided by the Mediterranean operational forecasting system, MFSTEP. The main purpose of this exploratory study is to carry out a cost-benefit analysis for different development scenarios, by comparing the...

In this paper we present a systematic attempt to assess economic value of climate change impact on forest ecosystems and human welfare. In the present study, climate change impacts are downscaled to the different European countries, which in turn constitute the elements of our analysis. First,...

We use conjoint choice questions to investigate people's preferences for income and reductions in mortality risks delivered by contaminated site remediation policies. Our survey is self-administered using the computer by residents of four cities in Italy with severely contaminated sites. We...

We use data from a survey of residents of five Italian cities conducted in late Spring 2004 to estimate the discount rates implicit in (a) money v. future risk reductions and (b) money v. money tradeoffs. We find that the mean personal discount rate is 2% in (a) and 8.7% in (b). The latter is...

This paper evaluates how different types of speculation affect the volatility of commodities' futures prices. We adopt four indexes of speculation: Working's T, the market share of non-commercial traders, the percentage of net long speculators over total open interest in future markets, which...

This paper analyses futures prices for four energy commodities (light sweet crude oil, heating oil, gasoline and natural gas) and five agricultural commodities (corn, oats, soybean oil, soybeans and wheat), over the period 1986-2010. Using CCC and DCC multivariate GARCH models, we find that...