Objectives: Smoking during pregnancy is a key preventable risk contributor to poor infant health. Our study presents a full dynamic relationship between the timing of prenatal smoking cessation or reduction and infant birth weight. Methods: Using a large representative dataset of birth cohort in...

In many rural areas land use patterns are shifting from agriculture or woodland to residential development. This is especially true in areas possessing significant natural amenities like the sweeping vistas, white-water rivers, and blue-ridged mountains of Southern Appalachia. As in-migration...

Corporate sponsorship plays an important role in the entertainment business. The question becomes: what influences the value of a sponsorship contract? Empirical analysis of this question is relatively limited because of a lack of complete data on contract values. This is especially true in...

In an effort to improve efficiency of electrical markets the U.S. government hopes to encourage changing household use patterns, such as dishwasher and clothes dryer use, to off-peak times. One strategy has been to subsidize the installation of smart meters. In addition the government has...

Retail competition has been introduced in many states as part of electricity industry deregulation. Following problems in the electricity market in California in 2000/01 many states, including NC, put deregulation plans on hold. Where retail competition is allowed consumers can choose their...

Cross sectional employment data is not random. Individuals who survive to a longer level of tenure tend to have a higher level of productivity than those who exit earlier. This result suggests that in cross sectional data high productivity workers are over-sampled at high levels of tenure. In...

We estimate the economic values of Saginaw Bay coastal marshes with multiple methods. First we estimate the value of coastal marsh recreation with two variations of the travel cost method: the single-site recreation demand model and the recreation site selection or random utility model. Using...

Cross sectional employment data is not random. Workers who survive to a longer level of tenure tend to have a higher level of productivity than those who exit earlier. Wage equations that use cross sectional data could be biased from the over sampling of high productive workers at long levels of...

In this paper we propose an alternative model for linking revealed preference and stated preference models of recreation when a single travel cost measure is difficult to obtain. We show that this model can be used to test convergent validity and offers an alternative scope test that does not...

A willingness to accept framework is used to measure the compensation required to allow wind generation windmills to be built in the mountains of North Carolina. We address why the NIMBY syndrome may arise when choosing site locations, the perceived property rights of view-sheds, as well as the...