This paper argues that the widespread belief that discrete contingent valuation (CV) questions yield substantially larger estimates of the mean (and the median) willingness to pay (WTP) for nonmarket environmental resources in comparison to estimates from open-ended CV questions is unfounded. A...

This paper discusses the role of economic integration in a model of endogenous growth where the size of the firm and the interactions between growth and the endogenous structure of the market play a crucial role. The focus is on the pure scale effects of integration and their welfare...

A proposed plan to preserve beach and beach access along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore thorugh beach re-nourishment offers the opportunity to apply contingent valuation techniques to explore the implications of three sources of preference heterogeneity for measures of people's willingness...

This paper reports the first attempt to measure the importance of controlling marine debris as an aesthetic characteristic of beaches and coastal area. The results are based on a contingent valuation survey designed to estimate the economic value people would place on controlling marine debris...

Economic theory often provides us with qualitative information on the properties of the functions in a model but rarely indicates their explicit functional form. Among these properties one can find monotonicity, concavity and supermodularity, which involve restricting the sign of the...

We propose a minimum chi-square estimator for the parameters of an ergodic system of stochastic differential equations with partially observed state. We prove that the efficiency of the estimator approaches that of maximum likelihood as the number of moment functions entering the chi-square...

Pharmacy benefit management companies (PBMs) have emerged over the past decade in response to increased demand for health care cost containment. The ability to obtain volume rebates from drug manufacturers was the principle value added by the PBM industry during the early 1990s. However, PBM...

The most popular survey method used in contingent valuations asks "open-ended" dichotomous choice questions. This method generates grouped or interval-censored data on respondents' willingness to pay. This paper specifies the willingness to pay distribution using the proportional hazard...

This paper examines how schools districts have responded to fiscal constraints in the past to gain insight into how they might respond in the future. It uses cross sectional data for Texas and New York first to develop a measure of the fiscal condition of each district and, second, to examine...

A given set of users share the submodular cost of access to a network (or, more generally, the submodular cost of any idiosyncratic binary good). We compare strategyproof mechanisms that serve the efficient set of users (but do not necessarily balance the budget) with those that exactly cover...