This paper considers farmers willingness to pay (WTP) to conserve an endangered Irish farmland bird, the Corncrake (Crex crex). An Irish National Farm Survey (NFS) is used to produce individual farm-level WTP estimates for the year 2006. These figures are then aggregated to obtain a total value...

In contingent valuation, despite the fact that many externalities manifest themselves as costs to some and benefits to others, most studies restrict willingness to pay to being non-negative. In this paper, we investigate the impact of allowing for negative, zero and positive preferences for...

We investigate the behaviour of stock returns in Africa's largest markets namely, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Tunisia and Zimbabwe. The validity of the random walk hypothesis is examined and rejected by employing a battery of tests. Secondly we employ smooth transition and...

When estimating the determinants of perceived corruption, economists assumed that there is full independence across countries. In the presence of peer-group or learning effects through cross-border economic activity (such as trade or labor migration), this assumption might be violated. We...

This paper considers the use of spatial microsimulation in the aggregation of regional environmental benefit values. The developed spatial microsimulation model uses simulated annealing to match the Irish Census of Agriculture data to a Contingent Valuation Survey that contains information on...

Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls' school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, evoking a surge of building girls' schools in Protestant areas. Using county- and town-level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants decreased the...