Protected areas are employed worldwide as a means of conserving biodiversity. Unfortunately, restricting access to such areas imposes opportunity costs on local people who have traditionally relied on them to obtain resources such as fuelwood and bushmeat. We use contingent valuation to estimate...

Several recent powerful tornadoes have raised interest among the public and policymakers in tornado shelters. We estimate casualty functions (fatalities, injuries) based on factors like storm intensity, county population density, and time of day, using historical data from Oklahoma and then...

We develop and use an enhanced parity bounds model (EPBM) to examine the discrepancy between the stumpage price administratively determined under Ontario’s current stumpage pricing system and the market value of stumpage covering from June, 1995 to January, 2007. The results show that in the...

Omitted, misspecified, or mismeasured spatially varying characteristics are a cause for concern in hedonic house price models. Spatial econometrics or spatial fixed effects have become popular ways of addressing these concerns. We discuss the limitations of standard spatial approaches to hedonic...

Views of natural areas and green space may have value quite apart from access to those lands. Using 25 years of home sales data from St. Louis County, Missouri, and modern geographic information system tools to measure views, we estimate a hedonic property fixed-effects model that captures the...

In contingent valuation, the willingness to pay for hypothetical programs may be affected by the order in which programs are presented to respondents. With inclusive lists, economic theory suggests that sequence effects should be expected. However, when policy makers allocate public budgets to...

One of the main issues on the research agenda regarding stated preference methods concerns the heterogeneity of preferences either within or between individuals. We present a multilevel mixed model (MMM) to capture heterogeneity in deterministic utility components, instead of simply leaving them...

Using multiple choice tasks per respondent in discrete choice experiment studies increases the amount of available information. However, respondents’ learning and fatigue may lead to changes in observed utility function preference (taste) parameters, as well as the variance in its error term...

We demonstrate how choice experiment survey methods can be used to guide ecosystem restoration efforts. We use a choice experiment survey to estimate willingness to pay (WTP) for different attributes of restored grassland ecosystems. We find that the presence of nearby grasslands increases a...

In a site-selection choice experiment various hypotheses are tested related to spatial heterogeneity in willingness to pay (WTP) for environmental improvements. Spatial heterogeneity is measured through distance-decay effects, substitute sites inside and outside the experiment’s choice set,...