In the early 1990s the attention of economists was captured by empirical evidence suggesting that rising income levels in developing countries could be good rather than bad for the environment. This evidence drove a stake into the heart of those opposing growth on environmental grounds....

Climate change has come to the forefront of Australian politics and there is now an active on-going policy debate about how to best reach a commonly agreed long term goal. This paper looks at five major dimensions of this debate and constructs policy options based on them. A discrete choice...

Value estimates for environmental goods can be obtained by either estimating preference parameters as "revealed" through behavior related to some aspect of the amenity or using "stated" information concerning preferences for the good. In the environmental economics literature the stated...

This paper considers the effects for offering a "would-not-vote" option in contingent valuation (CV) questions framed using the referendum format. This approach arises from a suggestion made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) panel on contingent valuation. The NOAA...

The standard Tobit maximum likelihood estimator under zero censoring threshold produces inconsistent parameter estimates, when the constant censoring threshold γ is non-zero and unknown. Unfortunately, the recording of a zero rather than the actual censoring threshold value is typical of...

Researchers, using contingent valuation (CV) to value changes in nonmarket goods, typically believe respondents always answer questions truthfully or they answer truthfully only when it is in their interest to do so. The second position, while consistent with economic theory, implies that...

Consideration sets have become a central concept in the study of consumer behavior. Frequently, consumers are asked to split choice alternatives into those that that they would consider and those that they would not. Information on alternatives not in the consideration set is then typically not...

We analyze whether it is better to forecast air travel demand using aggregate data at (say) a national level, or to aggregate the forecasts derived for individual airports using airport-specific data. We compare the US Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) practice of predicting the total...