Given potential growth in outdoor rock climbing and its concentration on public lands, the management of climbing access in wilderness areas is an issue of considerable national controversy in the United States. A proposed rule change by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) would prohibit the use of...

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...

We explore the distributional consequences of various fee schemes and other policy programs to reduce overfishing in the gulf of Mexico recreational fishery. The econometric model allows the marginal utility of income to vary across three income groups. We find that flat fees have a strong...

Abstract. A traditional assumption made in the literature is that the value of an individual's time spent in any activity is equal to his or her wage rate. This result stems from the derivation of the value of leisure time in the context of the standard labor supply model. This paper presents...

Recreation demand modelers have attempted to identify and incorporate the opportunity cost of an individual's time in travel and on-site in the model. Larson (1993b) focused on the value of leisure time in a model where individuals face a fixed work week. In this paper we examine the connection...

Although estimates of people’s values for public goods are often needed to conduct costbenefit analysis, existing value elicitation methods are prone to a number of well-documented biases. We argue that some of these biases result because people derive utility from the act of saying they are...

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,...