Congestion plays a central role in urban and transportation economics. Existing estimates of congestion costs rely on stated or revealed preferences studies. We explore a complementary measure of congestion costs based on self-reported happiness. Exploiting quasi-random variation in daily...

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...

This paper examines the concern for relative standing among rural households in China. We use a survey-experimental method to measure to what extent poor Chinese farmers care about their relative income and find that the respondents care to a high degree. Compared to previous studies in...

The objective of this paper was to investigate variations in the risk of suicide by socioeconomic status/position (SES) for men and women. Data on 15,648 suicide deaths between 18-65 year old men and women over the period 1981-1997 were linked to data on SES indicators, using a nested case...

Using nationally representative data, the present paper examines the impact of China's ongoing rural tax reform on farmers. The difficulties in further local governance restructuring are also discussed. It is argued that the issues associated with rural taxation and local governance in China...

Various decentralization experiments are currently underway in the Chinese forestry sector. However, a key question often ignored by researchers and policymakers addresses what farmers really want from reform. This paper uses a survey-based choice experiment to investigate farmers’ preferences...

This paper examines the concern for relative standing among rural households in China. We used a survey-experimental method to measure to what extent poor Chinese farmers care about their relative income and found that the respondents cared to a high degree. Compared to previous studies in...

Hypothetical bias is one of the main issues bedeviling the field of nonmarket valuation. The general criticism is that survey responses reflect how people would like to behave, rather than how they actually behave. In our study of climate change and emissions reductions, we took advantage of the...