Environmental Economics

The cromulent economics blog

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Category: Dubious to hopeless

  • AERE Happy Hour at the SEA meetings

    I just sent this message: AERE / SEA session participants, Let's have our informal AERE Happy Hour after the Distinguished Guest Lecture ("Life as a Lab: Using Field Experiments in Economics" John List [see note below]) on Saturday. This is a great chance to meet old friends and new and organize your dinner party!  …

  • What is the optimal number of time slots on a Doodle Poll?

    I don't know the answer, but I do know that 64 is too many.

  • Dubious and Dubiouser*

    From the Miscellany Section of Economic Inquiry: We collect contingent valuation data from 524 student survey respondents over a 3-day, 72-hour period. Data analysis of a hypothetical campus referendum focuses on time-of-day effects on willingness to pay for a renewable energy project. We find that subjects responding to the survey during the night-time hours (i.e.,…

  • New paper on hypothetical bias in contingent behavior data

    This has just been published in the journal Economics and Business Letters: Special Issue on Cultural Industries: Criterion and predictive validity of revealed and stated preference data: the case of “Mountain Home Music” concert demand John C. Whitehead, Douglas Simpson Noonan, Elizabeth Marquardt Abstract Despite a robust literature on nonmarket valuation of cultural assets, serious…

  • “A Challenge to Three Widely Held Ideas in Environmental Valuation”

    Matt Interis: Environmental valuation is the branch of environmental economics in which researchers estimate the economic value of environmental goods and services. Environmental valuation has been practiced for decades. However, there are some ideas in the field of environmental valuation held by many environmental economists and nonenvironmental economists that appear to be outdated. This article…

  • New working paper

    http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/aplwpaper/14-09.htm:  Predictive Validity of Stated Preference Data: Evidence from Mountain Bike Park Visits Before and After Trail System Expansion Kevin Atkinson and John C. Whitehead (whiteheadjc@appstate.edu) No 14-09, Working Papers from Department of Economics, Appalachian State University Abstract: This paper investigates the validity of stated preference data for use in recreation demand estimation. We use…

  • This guy (yes, I’ve been watching MNF) thinks I’m willing to pay about $16 per year to restore the environment of the southern Appalachians to a healthy state

    Spencer Banzhaf: In a new RFF discussion paper, “Valuation of Ecosystem Services in the Southern Appalachian Mountains,” RFF colleagues Dallas Burtraw, Alan Krupnick, and Juha Siikamäki and I, along with  Susie Chung Criscimagna of Eden Housing, Bernard Cosby of the University of Virginia, and David Evans of EPA,  estimate the monetary value of reducing acidity…

  • This isn’t the sort of press the UMKC B-school wanted

    We're number 1 in the world in generating bogus rankings! The governor of Missouri has called for an investigation into the validity of rankings that prominently featured the University of Missouri at Kansas City’s business school. Gov. Jay Nixon sent a letter to the university’s Board of Curators after an investigation by The Kansas City Star revealed…

  • Are all citations good citations?

    My dissertation, written under the direction Glenn Blomquist in 1989, considered whether information about alternative environmental goods was missing from contingent valuation (CV) scenarios. Subsequently we received funding to consider whether the CV method could distinguish amongst quality differentiated environmental goods. The paper got beat around a bit but eventually Blomquist and Whitehead (1998) was…

  • I received a response to my letter to Senator Vitter

    It wasn't very responsive to my concerns. Here is the whole thing (Download {Disarmed} Here to Help).