The development of a market in groundwater usage rights can be inhibited by constraints arising from the institutional context. Such impediments may reduce the potential gains from trade and may generate high transaction costs for prospective traders. We analyse the regulations and policies...

In the past three decades, Chinese electricity industry has experienced a series of regulatory reforms serving different purposes at different stages. In 2002, the former vertically integrated electricity utility - the State Power Corporation (SPC) – was divested and the generation sector was...

Residential energy consumption (REC) is the second largest energy use category (10%) in China and urban residents account for most of the REC. Understanding the underlying drivers of variations of urban REC thus helps to identify challenges and opportunities and provide advices for future policy...

This short paper provides a simple introduction on how a simulation model implemented in Microsoft Excel® can be optimised using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming and the compressed simulated annealing algorithm (Ohlmann et al., 2004; Ohlmann and Thomas, 2007). The standard simulated...

A target to reduce phosphorus flows into the Gippsland Lakes in south-eastern Australia by 40 per cent to improve water quality has previously been established by stakeholders. An integrated analysis at the catchment scale is undertaken to assess the agricultural land management changes required...

This is a pre-publication version of: Pannell, D.J., Roberts, A.M., Park, G., Alexander, J., Curatolo, A. and Marsh, S. (2012). Integrated assessment of public investment in land-use change to protect environmental assets in Australia, Land Use Policy 29(2): 377-387.

This paper presents models that predict two recreational fishing trip parameters: the length of a trip and the timing of a trip within a year. A discrete choice (logit) model linking the choice of trip timing to calendar events, the demographic characteristics of anglers as well as the nature of...

Allocation of fish resource is a controversial subject. Decision making is partly made difficult by the lack of knowledge on recreational fishing preferences and the value of fishing opportunities. This study investigates fishing site choices in Western Australia. Recreational fishing data...

This paper has been published in a peer-reviewed journal as: Gillespie, R. & M. E. Kragt (2012). "Accounting for nonmarket impacts in a benefit-cost analysis of underground coal mining in New South Wales, Australia." Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis 3(2): article 4. DOI: 10.1515/2152-2812.1101

We argue that previous assessments of discriminatory-price conservation auctions may have systematically overestimated their performance relative to uniform-payment schemes due to an inappropriate counterfactual comparison. We demonstrate that the cost curve (and not the bid curve) is the...