Science funding agencies such as the NIH, NSF, and their counterparts around the world are often criticized for being too conservative, funding incremental innovations over more radical but riskier projects. One explanation for their conservatism is the way the agencies use peer review of...

This volume describes what is arguably the first and only valuation study to meet in full the reference study standards set by NOAA's Blue Ribbon Panel on Contingent Valuation. This book documents a contingent valuation study for a generic environmental good: preventing the likely injuries from...

Recent Monte Carlo work on choosing experimental designs for discrete choice experiments seemed to greatly simplify this choice for applied researchers. It suggested that (a) commonly used designs can generate unbiased estimates for indirect utility function specifications with main effects only...

We analyze whether it is better to forecast air travel demand using aggregate data at (say) a national level or whether one should aggregate forecasts derived for individual airports using airport-specific data. We compare the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) practice of predicting...

Contrary to accepted belief, the standard Tobit maximum likelihood estimator produces inconsistent parameter estimates, when the constant censoring threshold c is non-zero and unknown. Unfortunately the recording of a zero rather than the actual censoring threshold value is typical of economic...

In 1992 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) convened a panel of prominent social scientists to assess the reliability of natural resource damage estimates derived from contingent valuation (CV). The product of the Panel's deliberations was a report that laid out a set of...