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...

Much of the justification for environmental rulemaking rests on estimates of the benefits to society of reduced mortality rates. Yet the literature providing estimates of the willingness to pay (WTP) for mortality risk reductions measures the value that healthy, prime-aged adults place on...

The focus of the present study is on consumer health information in relation to supplier induced demand (SID). We argue that a comparison between medical professionals and nonmedical professionals fails to identify demand inducement. Using a new information measure based on questions of the...

This paper describes a way of constructing an ECM algorithm such that it converges at the rate of the EM algorithm. The approach is motivated by the well known conjugate directions algorithm, and a special case of it is when the parameters corresponding to different CM steps are orthogonal....

In 1967, John Krutilla suggested a relationship between car camping, canoe cruising, and cross-country skiing and induced demand for wild, primitive, and wilderness-related opportunities. Here, the time trend of cross-section parameter estimates of the relationship is examined. Households...

This study measured the discount rates of a sample of 262 farm households in the Ethiopian highlands, using a time preference experiment with real payoffs. In general, the median discount rate was very high—more than double the interest rate on the outstanding debt—and varied systematically...

This study examines time-use for outdoor recreation during 1965 to 2007. Using data on over 47,000 individuals from six nationally representative time-use surveys, we first document time-use trends between 1965 and 2007. We then develop a two-part instrumental variable censored regression model...

The environmental impacts on an economy is studied over time using endogenous growth theory. Externalities from the environment on production are central in the analysis, and we examine whether an optimal path realizes more rapid economic growth. The paper is mainly focusing on developing...

This paper studies the implications of climatic uncertainty and poverty for resource degradation. In doing so, two partial models are considered. The first model focuses on productive inputs only, while the second model describes the role of soil conservation inputs. Both models are first...

This paper studies soil depletion incentives in a dynamic economic model under two different sources of revenue uncertainty (production- and output price risk). The focus is on the long-term effects of risk averse preferences. The land manager is assumed to posses three classes of instruments to...