The destruction of natural habitats has prompted concerns about the loss of biological diversity. Regrettably, however, there is no consensus among either biologists or economists on the most meaningful measures of biodiversity. Fundamentally different definitions are useful in asking...

The past few years have seen a highly charged debate about whether contingent valuation (CV) surveys can provide valid economic measures of people's values for environmental resources. In an effort to appraise the validity of CV measures of economic value, a distinguished panel of social...

In this paper we aim - through an 'experimentally-adapted' Contingent Valuation survey - to look into the attributes of Ghanaians' willingness-to-pay for green products. This would help us addressing two main issues: first, from a theoretical point of view, we shall assess whether Ghanaians show...

Much is known about private returns to education in the form of higher earnings. Less is known about social value, over and above the private, market value. Associations between education and socially-desirable outcomes are strong, but disentangling the effect of education from other causal...

Using an open-ended contingent valuation survey, we analyze how (i) experience of a power outage due to one of the worst storms ever to hit Sweden and (ii) a cheap talk script affect respondents' WTP to avoid power outages. Experience significantly increases and a cheap talk script decreases the...

What is the value of hazardous weather warnings? To answer this question, we focus on the avalanche bulletin for Switzerland issued by the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF). We take a survey-based, non-market valuation approach to estimating the value of hypothetical...

The aim of this paper is to analyse patterns of private individual giving to Cultural Heritage institutions in Italy. Based on the emerging economic literature on pro-social behavior, we carried out a Contingent Valuation survey to assess individuals' willingness to donate to museums and...

This paper investigates whether a nation's contingent value of hosting a mega-event depends on past experience with implied public goods benefits for its residents. Applying data from an ex-ante and ex-post query based on contingent valuation methods, we use the FIFA World Cup 2006 as a natural...

This paper is concerned with the empirical relationship between biodiversity conservation valuesand income. We use random effects panel models to examine the effects of income, and then GDPper capita, on willingness to pay for habitat and biodiversity conservation. In a meta-analysis,...

Reducing deforestation and forest degradation will mean imposing restrictions on the use of forest resources by households that currently use natural forests to maintain their livelihoods. An emerging issue in forest monitoring is the need to assess social and economic impacts in forest user...