Since 1999, China has pursued Grain for Green, an ambitious conservation set-aside program to prevent soil erosion. This paper evaluates its cost-effectiveness and sustainability. The results indicate that while the program has made a clear attempt to retire plots that are susceptible to soil...

Conservation easements allow landowners to collect earnings from their land, while reducing their tax burdens because the land cannot be sold into development. Conservation assures open space amenities for nearby residents, however, the residents bear a tax increase that offsets the owner’s...

We use a laboratory experiment, calibrated to a representative New Zealand fishery, to assess three sealed-bid, multi-unit demand auction mechanisms under consideration for allocating quota for species being introduced into the Quota Management System. These auctions allocate the K units to the...

International environmental organizations propose voluntary eco-labeling as a market incentive to promote industry to operate in an ecologically sustainable and environmentally friendly manner. A microeconomic analysis questions whether voluntary eco-labeling will cause producer profits in a...

States and municipalities have committed over $24 billion in bond issues for land conservation in recent years, yet the structure of the land conservation industry and markets is poorly understood. Using a stated choice experiment survey, we examine the role of public access in willingness to...

International environmental groups propose to implement new standards of forest management through programs that certify producers who meet criteria to enhance biodiversity or sustainability. These producers could earn an "eco-label" that identifies their products for consumers. We consider...

Alternative funding approaches affect stated preferences. An individual’s willingness to reallocate existing tax dollars exceeds willingness to pay new taxes to conserve land. However, stated preferences also imply a non-zero opportunity cost to existing tax dollars; different income groups...

Policymakers anticipate strong local opposition to undesirable land-uses, such as large-scale landfills, and therefore seek new methods for selecting sites. This paper develops an approach that integrates the technical, economic, and political concerns relevant to siting decisions, beginning...

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...