Estimating the economic benefits of reduced health damages due to improvements in environmental quality continues to challenge economists. We review welfare measures associated with reduced wildfire smoke exposure, and a unique dataset from California’s Station Fire of 2009 allows for a...

Open space lands, national forests in particular, are usually treated as homogeneous entities in hedonic price studies. Failure to account for the heterogeneous nature of public open spaces may result in inappropriate inferences about the benefits of proximate location to such lands. In this...

To assess the relative importance of current costs and future benefits of nuclear waste storage, we develop a simple model of bequest value. The basic model of nonparternalistic altruism is extended to account for the uncertain nature of the externality. ...

This paper provides an empirical framework for testing a welfare change measure by considering the following problem: a public agency is faced with the decision of how to maximize public welfare from optimally locating a large-scale national recreational ...

Two versions of a contingent valuation questionnaire that differ only in the device used to communicate risks from hazardous waste were sent to California households. Both risk communication devices provide WTP functions which vary in a statistically significant fashion with the absolute risk...

I evaluate the potential usefulness of nonmarket valuation concepts and techniques from environmental economics for improving wildlife conservation. The concepts include distinguishing between on-site recreation use value and off-site passive use or ...

Fiscal equivalence for efficient provision of a public good requires perfect correspondence between political and economic jurisdictions. However, the spatial extent of the economic jurisdiction is an empirical question. Drawing on four survey-based valuation studies, we measure the "relative...

A mail survey was administered to a panel of Colorado consumers to obtain estimates of willingness to pay (WTP) for preserving Union Park. Detailed socioeconomic data for all surveyed individuals was available a priori. We develop and employ the multiple-...