This paper provides a methodology for the estimation of recreational demand functions and values using an ecoregional approach. Ten ecoregions in the continental US were defined based on similarly functioning ecosystem characters. The individual travel cost method was employed to estimate the...

One of the major shortcommings of past environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) studies is that the spatiotemporal aspects within the data have largely been ignored. By ignoring the spatial aspect of pollution emissions past estimates of the EKC implicitly assume that a region’s emissions are...

Using estimation of demand for the George Washington/Jefferson NationalForest as a case study, it is shown that in a stratified/clustered on-sitesample, latent heterogeneity needs to be accounted for twice: first to accountfor dispersion in the data caused by unobservability of the process that...

Water quality trading (trading) as a means to improve water quality has become an increasingly popular instrument considered by environmental policy makers. Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lists more than forty current trading programs in the U.S., only a few active markets...

This paper explores the influence of demographic and spatial variables on individual participation and consumption of wildland area recreation. Data from the National Survey on Recreation and the Environment are combined with geographical information system-based distance measures to develop...

The assumption of independence of irrelevant alternatives in a sequential contingent valuation format should be questioned. Statistically, most valuation studies treat nonindependence as a consequence of unobserved individual effects. Another approach is to consider an inferentialprocess in...

Estimating regional demand models by pooling different samples without correcting for such differences causes model misspecification as each sample belongs to a different population. Weighted regression using Pseudolikelihood to account for differences in sample population with adjustment for...

Although mixed logit models are common in stated preference applications, resulting welfare estimates can be sensitive to minor changes in specification. This can be of critical relevance for policy and welfare analysis, particularly if policymakers are unaware of practical implications. Drawing...

Tackling the problem of ecosystem services degradation is an important policy challenge. Different types of economic instruments have been employed by conservation agencies to meet this challenge. Notable among them are Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes that pay private landowners to...

This research explores the welfare consequences of substituting carbon taxes for conventional distortionary taxes in a small open economy, using Pennsylvania as case study. A computable general equilibrium (CGE) model is developed for Pennsylvania to simulate possible outcomes when carbon taxes...