This paper investigates the idea that people are unsure about the value they place on prospective changes in environmental goods. In particular, we focus on a parametric explanation of the determinants of a "value gap," the difference between the most someone is sure they would pay for an...

Alternative funding approaches affect stated preferences. An individual’s willingness to reallocate existing tax dollars exceeds willingness to pay new taxes to conserve land. However, stated preferences also imply a non-zero opportunity cost to existing tax dollars; different income groups...

This study investigates whether public and expert preferences diverge in a valuation of two marine reserves in Western Australia. Identical choice experiments are applied to a sample of marine scientists and the Western Australian community. Evidence of both divergence and convergence between...

Decentralization experiments are currently underway in the Chinese forestry sector. However, researchers and policy makers tend to ignore a key question: what do forest farmers really want from reform? This paper addresses this question using a survey-based choice experiment to investigate...

A contingent valuation study conducted in China, Sweden, and the United States was used to investigate citizens’ willingness to pay (WTP) for reducing CO2 emissions. We find that a majority of the respondents in all three countries believe that the mean global temperature has increased over...

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...

We contrast the discovered preference hypothesis against the theory of coherent arbitrariness in a split-sample stated choice experiment on flood-risk exposure. A semiparametric local multinomial logit model is developed as an alternative to the Swait and Louviere (1993) test procedure...

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...

Conventional analysis of public goods provision aggregates individual willingness to pay while treating income as exogenous, ignoring the fact that we generate income to allow us to purchase utility-generating goods. We explore the implications of endogenizing the labor/leisure decision by...