Using a quasi-field experiment, we report on subjects' perceptions of the risks of hurricanes. All experimental subjects were displaced by either Hurricane Katrina or Rita, in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas, except for a small control group consisting of people who live in central Texas....

We conduct multiple price list experiments that elicit life duration risk preferences from amateur auto racers, technical rock climbers, SCUBA divers, and a student control group. We posit a preference function that allows for risk aversion and probability weighting. We are particularly...

This paper investigates whether preferences over environmental risks are best modeled using probability-weighted utility functions or can be reasonably approximated by expected utility (EU) or subjective EU models as is typically assumed. I elicit risk attitudes in the financial and...

To assess the relative importance of current costs and future benefits of nuclear waste storage, we develop a simple model of bequest value. The basic model of nonparternalistic altruism is extended to account for the uncertain nature of the externality. The model is applied estimating the...

If housing markets exhibit slow adjustment to system shocks, then hedonic estimates of the price impact from environmental amenity trends may be time variant. This paper suggests an alternative to the cross-sectional model for estimating hedonic prices using an error correction approach that...

This paper explores how property-right assignment affects social efficiency when a public program has both “public good” and “public bad” components. We show that when willingness to accept a public bad exceeds the willingness to pay, the net benefit is unambiguously lower when the...

Contingent valuation surveys frequently ask the same respondent for willingness to pay (WTP) for either different programs or different levels of provision of a single program. When multiple scenarios are considered by the respondent, the errors in the estimates of WTP are likely to be...

Few theoretically-consistent empirical models addressing the relationship between ambiguity, risk, and preferences for health and safety exist. To fill this gap, we propose a theoretical non-expected-utility model (NEUM) that is relatively easy to estimate using an interval-data model. The NEUM...

Empirical research on the relationship between economic growth and its impact on the environment often tests the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), a hypothesis that rising national output leads to increases in pollution emissions until an economy reaches a certain size, and decreases...