Protected areas are employed worldwide as a means of conserving biodiversity. Unfortunately, restricting access to such areas imposes opportunity costs on local people who have traditionally relied on them to obtain resources such as fuelwood and bushmeat. We use contingent valuation to estimate...

Sustainable development has been a popular buzzword among policymakers and economists for over a decade. Although a key tenet of maintaining a sustainable development path for many economies rests on attracting mobile capital, theoretical and empirical evidence into the institutional policies...

Conventional wisdom implies economic growth and environmental quality are incompatible policy objectives. Recent empirical evidence, however, suggests stringency of environmental regulations are only weakly (or not at all) associated with decreased manufacturing activity. This paper uses more...

Psychological insights have made inroads within most areas of study in economics. One area where less advance has occurred is environmental and resource economics. In this study, we examine preference reversals over evaluation modes, in which economic values critically depend on whether a good...

A concern with the contingent valuation method (CVM) is the finding that hypothetical and real statements of value often differ. We test whether hypothetical bias, broadly defined, is independent of location by comparing real and hypothetical votes on a dichotomous choice referendum in China,...