Land-use policies may affect the structure of local economies as they respond to internal and external factors. We apply a discrete duration model to estimate the effect of designated wilderness on the rate and timing of counties’ economic transition in the Appalachian Region from 1969 to...

This paper examines whether and how survey respondents react to spatial factors in stated preference surveys, and the ways in which preferences for spatial factors may influence welfare estimation. Alternative proposals to develop rural lands for residential purposes in southern New England were...

This paper addresses uncertain biomass shifts in renewable resources. A biomass shift occurs when a dominant renewable resource stock collapses and its ecosystem niche is filled by a replacement species which increases in abundance after the initial collapse. This paper develops a bioeconomic...

This paper explores potential focus shift asymmetries in an ordered strength of preference model applied to contingent choice data. A focus shift occurs when respondents weight factors differently when assessing preference for an "accepted" scenario than they do when assessing preference for a...

Land value taxation has numerous potential advantages compared to conventional property taxes on capital and land. The models that establish these advantages, however, are grounded in the unlikely assumption that land values are assessed without error. This paper demonstrates that levying taxes...

In stated preference valuation of farmland preservation, respondents are often told that preservation will occur within various jurisdictional scales—that is, community or state—but are not told the specific location of parcels. The resultant availability of welfare estimates for different...

Stated preference surveys often provide ambiguous descriptions of ecological commodities, yielding welfare estimates that have unclear interpretations and cannot be linked to measurable outcomes. This paper proposes guidelines to promote ecological content validity in survey scenarios and...