It is natural to turn to the richness of panel data to improve the precision of estimated tourism demand elasticities. However, the likely presence of common shocks shared across the underlying macroeconomic variables and across regions in the panel has so far been neglected in the tourism...

This report provides quantitative and qualitative measures of the impact of same-sex marriage on Hawai'i's economy and government. We find that marriage equality is likely to lead to substantial increases in visitor arrivals, visitor spending, and state and county general excise tax revenues. We...

This article recounts the early years of one of the most successful tourist destinations in the world, Hawaii, from about 1870 to 1940. Tourism began in Hawaii when faster and more predictable steamships replaced sailing vessels in trans-Pacific travel. Governments (international, national, and...

The importance of understanding the macro-economic impact of natural disasters cannot be overstated. Hurricane Iniki, that hit the Hawaiian island of Kauai on September 11th, 1992, offers an ideal case study to better understand the long-term economic impacts of a major disaster. Iniki is...

During the early 1960s a few of Hawaii’s public high schools began to offer economics courses, and they gradually became popular social studies electives. By 1999, over 46% of public high school seniors completed a one-semester course in economics. From this peak, enrollment rates would...

Hurricane Iniki, that hit the island of Kauai on September 11th, 1992, was the strongest hurricane that hit the Hawaiian Islands in recorded history, and the one that wrought the most damage, estimated at 7.4 billion (in 2008 US$). We provide an assessment of Hawaii’s vulnerability to...

Cointegration analysis has gradually appeared in the empirical tourism literature. However, the focus has been exclusively on the demand side, neglecting potentially-important supply-side influences and risking endogeneity bias. One reason for this omission may be the difficulty identifying...

In this paper, an integrated model for the prevention and control of an invasive species is developed. The generality of the model allows it to be used for both existing and potential threats to the system of interest. The deterministic nature of arrivals in the model allows for a clear...

In 2001, the State of Hawaii established a 100 percent tax credit to promote investment in several targeted high technology industries. We chronicle the evolution of Hawaii’s high technology tax credits, describe their provisions, and catalog a host of problems associated with determining...

This paper develops a two-stage model for the optimal management of a potential invasive species. The arrival of an invasive species is modeled as an irreversible event with an uncertain arrival time. The model is solved in two stages, beginning with the post-invasion stage. In this stage, we...