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...

We attempt a first combination of the participatory technique known as the "citizens’ jury" with choice modelling, a stated-preference technique increasingly favored by environmental economists. Our application is conducted in the context of water quality improvements under the Water Framework...

Recent studies suggest that direct preferences regarding investment gains and losses may significantly affect people’s behavior in financial markets. The present paper shows that this hypothesis has striking implications for the choice of discount rates in cost-benefit analysis. The paper...

A concern with the contingent valuation method (CVM) is the finding that hypothetical and real statements of value often differ. We test whether hypothetical bias, broadly defined, is independent of location by comparing real and hypothetical votes on a dichotomous choice referendum in China,...

Government trustees conduct natural resource damage assessments (NRDAs) to hold firms liable for damages caused by their pollution. We analyze a model in which a trustee chooses NRDA accuracy and a firm chooses precaution in response, where increased NRDA accuracy increases expense but decreases...