inflation taxation and welfare with externalities and leisure this paper examines how inflation taxation affects resource allocation and welfare in a neoclassical growth model with leisure a production externality and money in the utility function switching from consumption taxation to inflation taxation to finance government spending reduces real money balances relative to income but increases consumption labor capital and output the net welfare effect of this switch depends crucially on the strength of the externality and on the elasticity of intertemporal substitution while it is always negative without the externality it is likely to be positive with a strong externality and elastic intertemporal substitution

multivariate count data regression models with individual panel data from an on site sample the purpose of this paper is to consider the problem of controlling for on site sampling in the context of a system or panel of demand equations specifically in the context of recreation demand we are concerned with the situation in which survey respondents are asked to provide information not only about the actual trips to a specific site observed behavior but also their anticipated trips either under current conditions or given price and quality changes a multivariate poisson log normal mpln model and a seemingly unrelated negative binomial sunb model are used to jointly model the observed and contingent behavior data and to correct for on site sampling

a panel travel cost model accounting for endogenous stratification and truncation a latent class approach in this paper we develop a panel data negative binomial count model that corrects for endogenous stratification and truncation we also incorporate a latent class structure into our panel specification which assumes that the observations are drawn from a finite number of segments where the distributions differ in the intercept and the coefficients of the explanatory variables the paper argues that count data panel models corrected for on site sampling may still be inadequate and potentially misleading if the population of interest is heterogeneous with respect to the impact of the chosen explanatory variables jel q51 q57

testing the validity of contingent behavior trip responses while a number of validity tests exist for contingent valuation data to date there are very few literature examples for contingent behavior cb data the objective of this study is to test the validity of cb trip data for different levels of rock climbing access using data from surveys implemented before and after a policy restricting recreational access was imposed results from generalized negative binomial and seemingly unrelated poisson regression models show significant sensitivity to scope and suggest that cb data may be a valuable supplement to revealed preference data when policy proposals are outside the range of historical conditions copyright 2002 oxford university press

investigation of stated and revealed preferences for an elk hunting raffle the charter forest experiment at the valles caldera national preserve vcnp in new mexico provides land managers policymakers and researchers a unique opportunity to examine an alternative public land management institution the vcnp mature bull elk permit lottery has been the largest revenue generating recreation program at the preserve since the program s inception in 2002 this paper uses stated and revealed preference ticket purchase data collected through an online survey to estimate a set of ticket demand equations for the purpose of assessing revenue generation access and the willingness to donate to this program

grain versus food a hidden issue in china s food policy debate abstract the paper examines the likely pattern of china s food trade in the future should china s food trade policy be adjusted to accommodate its comparative advantage differing from the common perception that china s overall food sector will follow the path of grain trade and face an ever growing trend of net imports this study has found an evolving pattern of exchanging food for food in china over the last 15 years the pattern is in part characterized by strong export expansion of selected food products such as vegetables and fruits aquatic products etc the economic rationale behind the pattern is examined through a comparison of relative costs among alternative food products in china the policy implications of the study are discussed

stationary sunspot equilibria in a finance constrained economy abstract stationary sunspot equilibria are shown to exist in a production economy with infinite lived agents when it is not possible to borrow against future wage income equilibrium fluctuations exhibit persistence over time scales of the same order of magnitude as observed business cycles an active fiscal policy that stabilizes aggregate money expenditures can prevent such fluctuations

combining contingent valuation and travel cost data for the valuation of non market goods the travel cost method tcm has long been used to infer the economic value of nonmarket resources and public goods more recently contingent valuation cvm survey methods have gained popularity for eliciting these values here cvm survey responses are combined with tcm data on actual market behavior to estimate jointly both the parameters of the underlying utility function and its corresponding ordinary demand function this is a prototypical empirical example of a new modeling strategy variants of which should prove useful in many applications especially where reliance on a single valuation method is undesirable

estimating the demand for a new technology bt cotton and insecticide policies this article examines the potential demand for bt cotton in the southeast from information gathered in the first year of commercialization we combine revealed preference rp data on adoption of bt cotton varieties with stated preference sp data on willingness to adopt to estimate demand using a double bounded maximum likelihood procedure using estimated demand equations we simulate the costs of reducing conventional insecticide applications through subsidization of bt cotton results indicate that reducing cotton insecticide applications by 40 in the southeast would require a 21 acre subsidy with total annual program costs between 53 million and 60 million

the individual travel cost method with consumer specific values of travel time savings the treatment of the opportunity cost of travel time in travel cost models has been an area of research interest for many decades our analysis develops a methodology to combine the travel distance and travel time data with respondent specific estimates of the value of travel time savings vtts the individual vtts are elicited with the use of discrete choice stated preference methods the travel time valuation procedure is integrated into the travel cost valuation exercise to create a two equation structural model of site valuation since the travel time equation of the structural model incorporates individual preference heterogeneity the full structure model provides a travel cost site demand model based upon individualized values of time the methodology is illustrated in a study of recreational birdwatching more specifically visits to a stork village in poland we show that the usual practice of basing respondents vtts on 1 3 of their wage rate is largely unfounded and propose alternatives including a separate component of the travel cost survey aimed at valuation of respondents vtts or as a second best asking if they wish if their journey was shorter and for those who do use full hourly wage as an indicator of their vtts

policy evaluation with combined actual and contingent response data the city of marietta georgia experimentally switched from flat fee financing to volume based pricing for its trash services in january 1994 both before and during the experiment detailed data on individuals observed responses to the actual introduction and contingent behavioral responses to a hypothetical introduction of volume based pricing were collected this study applies these data and investigates the methodology of collecting contingent behavior data and their use in policy analysis in particular this study empirically evaluates the effect of experience with the policy on responses to contingent behavior questions and tests for potential bias in the contingent behavior data

re evaluating the income elasticity of the property tax base an important research issue relating to the property tax is its income elasticity income elasticities provide a potentially cost effective means to forecast local government revenues and in policy analysis they are used to judge the tax s behavior over business cycles its stability and capacity to generate necessary growth in revenues its adequacy while previous income elasticity estimates have been derived from simple log linear models this paper focuses on the residential component of the property tax base and develops and estimates a nonlinear structural model of residential property valuation in further contrast to previous studies which have relied on national or state

a divisible search model of fiat money this paper extends the kiyotaki wright search model of fiat money to allow for divisible money and goods the extension allows me to examine the standard issues in monetary economics such as the neutrality and superneutrality of money by severing the artificial link in the kiyotaki wright model between the money supply and the number of money holders it is shown that money is neutral but not superneutral money growth generates a trading opportunity effect it changes the fraction of different agents in the economy and hence changes the probability with which agents have a successful match in addition money growth has a negative effect on the real money balance that is familiar in walrasian monetary models the balance of the two effects can imply a positive optimal money growth rate

convergent validity and the time consistency of preferences evidence from the iowa lakes recreation demand project we examine the consistency of preferences over time and as implied by revealed versus stated preference contingent behavior data studies in this area are typically based upon a single site and focus on consumer response to changes in travel cost or site access we use data from the iowa lakes project which provides information on usage patterns over several years and for 132 lakes along with detailed water quality data this allows us to test for convergence in how individuals respond to changing site characteristics as well as the consistency of preferences over time and between actual versus contingent trips

modelling recreation demand using choice experiments climbing in scotland this paper is concerned with the use of thechoice experiment method for modelling thedemand for recreation using the example ofrock climbing in scotland we begin byoutlining the method itself including itstheoretical and econometric underpinnings datacollection procedures are then outlined wepresent results from both nested and non nestedmodels and report some tests for theimplications of choice complexity andrationality finally we compare our resultswith a revealed preference data model based onthe same sample of climbers

china s food economy to the twenty first century supply demand and trade this paper accounts for the structural changes now taking place in china and suggests that china is not likely to become either an enormous importer or exporter of grain ultimately though china s grain balances will depend on decisions made by chinese policymakers rather than natural resource constraints p v this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

stabilizing competitive business cycles abstract we study how stylized monetary proportional money transfers fiscal lump sum money transfers and public expenditure policies may eliminate endogenous deterministic cycles and stationary markov sunspot equilibria in a simple version of the overlapping generations model we also present new constructive methods for analyzing stationary markov sunspot equilibria in such a framework

omitted cross price variable biases in the linear travel cost model correcting common misperceptions the essence of the travel cost method is that the combination of the number of visits to a site and the round trip travel costs for each recreationist traces out a demand relationship since the geographic location of the recreationist s residence exerts a kind of experimental control which forces the more distant consumer to bear higher travel and related costs these travel costs are used as proxies for prices in estimating demand for the site s services clawson 1959 has presented the two step method for valuing a single site s services however it has been pointed out in the literature that single and isolated recreation sites very rarely exist and the failure to include prices for alternative sites in the demand equation leads to biased estimates for the value of the resource under consideration the literature contains some misconceptions about the direction of the bias consider quotations from two frequently cited studies

reforms the weather and productivity growth in china s grain sector we use disaggregate county level production data to study the effects of economic reform on china s grain production between 1980 and 1990 china s grain production area is divided into five regions based on geographic agronomic and meteorological criteria regional grain production functions are estimated and weather is explicitly modeled the institutional impact of economic reform was found to explain about 38 of the production growth from 1980 to 1985 this is lower than the estimates reported in many previous studies regional differences in efficiency gains from economic reform and in the effects of weather on grain production are found to be significant

a note on the welfare effects of omitting substitute prices and qualities from travel cost models the bias to welfare estimates from omitting substitute prices or qualities in travel cost models is examined the presence of bias depends on whether single or multiple site changes are examined and the degree of correlation between the omitted and included prices for a multiple site price or quality change even when omitted price is uncorrelated with included price welfare estimates may be biased alternatively if omitted price is perfectly correlated the welfare measure may not be biased the presence of the bias depends equally on both the degree of correlation and whether a single or multiple change occurs this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the redistributive effects of inflation and the shape of money demand abstract i quantify the distributional effects of expected inflation in a sample of oecd countries using a microfounded model of money where agents differ in their consumption risk against which they can insure using money and government bonds the model is calibrated using harmonized wealth microdata from the luxembourg wealth study i find that the inflation tax is progressive for low inflation levels but it becomes regressive as inflation increases cut off points vary across countries and depend on discount factors and heterogeneity in consumption risk across agents moreover i find that the magnitude of inflation s distributional impact depends not only on wealth distribution but also and importantly on the curvature and height of the money demand curve indeed a higher and less elastic money demand leads to more regressive effects of inflation thus implying such effects are not necessarily stronger in a country with a more unequal wealth distribution

fiat money in a pairwise trading multi good overlapping generations model abstract this paper studies a stationary pure exchange overlapping generations model with a particular kind of randomly generated pairwise trading pattern this model in contrast to the usual overlapping generations models has the following implications as regards existence it is shown that a standard boundary condition on preferences is sufficient to imply the existence of a stationary monetary equilbrium as regards properties of the equilibrium for some specifications my model has a stationary equilibrium in which claims bear a higher rate of return than fiat money it is also proved that this stationary equilibrium is conditionally pareto optimal

optimal fiscal and monetary policy some recent results this paper studies the quantitative properties of fiscal and monetary policy in business cycle models in terms of fiscal policy optimal labor tax rates are virtually constant and optimal capital income tax rates are close to zero on average in terms of monetary policy the friedman rule is optimal nominal interest rates are zero and optimal monetary policy is activist in the sense that it responds to shocks to the economy

valuing the benefits of coastal water quality improvements using contingent and real behaviour recent moves in the european union have beenmade towards a toughening of legislation onbathing water quality this has focussedpolicy makers thoughts on the welfare benefitsresulting from such improvements especiallygiven their cost our paper uses a combinedstated and revealed preference approach tovalue coastal water quality improvements focussing on an area of scotland which hasconsistently failed to meet standards under thebathing waters directive we combine data onreal behaviour with data on contingentbehaviour using a random effects negativebinomial panel model this allows us to predictboth the change in participation trips shouldwater quality be improved and the welfareincrease per trip our model includes allowancefor the existence of substitute sites and forchanges in recreational behaviour during abeach visit

augmenting travel cost models with contingent behavior data this paper proposes contingent behavior survey questions as a valuable supplement to observed data in travel cost models of non market demand for recreational resources a set of observed and contingent behavior results for each survey respondent allows the researcher to control for individual heterogeneity by taking advantage of panel data methods when exploring the nature of respondent demands the contingent scenarios also provide opportunities to a test for differences between observed and contingent preferences and or b assess likely demands under conditionsbeyond the domain of observed variation in costs or resource attributes most importantly contingent scenarios allow the researcher to imposeexogenously varying travel costs exogenous imposition of travel costs together with panel methods reduces the omitted variables bias that plagues observed data travel cost models of recreational demand using a convenience sample of data for illustrative purposes we show how to estimate the demand for recreational angling by combining observed and contingent behavior data we begin with simple naive pooled poisson models and progress to more theoretically appropriate fixed effects panel poisson specifications

the economic costs of food self sufficiency in china abstract despite the surge in agricultural output since the late 1970s a comparison of china s resource endowments with those of its trading partners suggests that with continued rapid income growth food imports will again expand unless relative domestic prices are raised quantitative analysis of price policies which would achieve self sufficiency in the 1990s indicates net economic costs ranging between 2 3 of gnp annually these results are however particularly sensitive to the relatively undocumented changes taking place in the dependence of china s rapidly growing livestock sector on feed grains

monetary growth in a turnpike environment abstract a general equilibrium model of monetary growth in a turnpike economy is constructed it is shown that money lifts the economy up to a pareto superior growth path by eliminating the investment in projects with low returns the growth rate of the monetary economy is larger than that of the nonmonetary economy and mckinnon s complementarity hypothesis holds provided that the agents degree of relative risk aversion is not too large the main theorem states a sufficient condition for the existence of a monetary equilibrium with a constant rate of return on money

monetary policy and endowment risk in a limited participation model i introduction an asset market segmentation model is constructed in this paper to study the risk sharing role of monetary policy economic agents face uninsurable endowment risk when there is limited asset market participation because an initial money injection goes first to those who can access the asset market money is nonneutral and monetary policy redistributes consumption across agents thus monetary policy plays a risk sharing role that provides crude insurance limited participation models that capture nonneutralities of money were initially developed by grossman and weiss 1983 and rotemberg 1984 and followed by lucas 1990 fuerst 1992 and chatterjee and corbae 1992 recently alvarez and atkeson 1997 alvarez lucas and weber 2001 and alvarez atkeson and kehoe 2002 have made important contributions but they focus on the implications of liquidity effects asset prices and the exchange rate instead of the risk sharing implications of monetary policy my model is built on alvarez lucas and weber 2001 there are two types of households traders who participate in the asset market and nontraders who do not these types are determined exogenously in each period traders receive constant endowments whereas nontraders face uninsurable endowment shocks in the asset market the government injects money through open market operations and traders initially receive the money injection in equilibrium money is nonneutral and monetary policy redistributes consumption between traders and nontraders the government money injection increases traders consumption and decreases nontraders consumption because traders get the money injection through the asset market whereas nontraders suffer from inflation if nontraders all receive the same endowment shock then monetary policy is a perfect risk sharing tool that can smooth out consumption across traders and nontraders however if nontraders receive idiosyncratic endowment shocks then monetary policy is not enough to perfectly insure nontraders although monetary policy does not achieve a pareto optimal allocation it can mitigate the dispersion of consumption across nontraders the optimal money growth rate can be positive or negative depending on the endowment distribution the friedman rule is not optimal in general there is a set of limited participation literature where the asset market is endogenously segmented chatterjee and corbae 1992 alavarez atkeson and kehoe 2002 chiu 2004 and chiu and molico 2007 although endogenous asset market segmentation is useful in some contexts for this paper nothing is lost by assuming exogenous segmentation and much is gained in simplicity models of the redistributional effects of monetary policy include levine 1991 shi 1999 berentsen camera and waller 2005 and molico 2006 the models studied by levine 1991 and mollico 2006 are particularly relevant levine 1991 studies an incomplete markets environment where positive money growth implemented through lump sum transfers can be optimal molico 2006 studies a search environment and shows similarly that positive inflation with lump sum transfers can be welfare enhancing but not at high rates of inflation in both the levine 1991 and molico 2006 environments there is an insurance role for monetary policy much as in the environment studied in this paper the model here has the virtue of being much more tractable than either the levine 1991 or molico 2006 models furthermore a novelty here is to study an insurance role for monetary policy in the context of market segmentation where the agents who received the first round effects of monetary policy do not wish to share risk among themselves the key risk sharing problem has to do with risk sharing between asset market participants and nonparticipants the remainder of the paper is organized as follows

china s past present and future food economy can china continue to meet the challenges abstract this paper synthesizes the main findings and highlights the insights of six articles that examine how china has managed its agricultural resources in the past how agriculture is performing at present and what challenges lie ahead as the country seeks to meet the food needs of its growing population it provides common threads of empirical evidence on china s agricultural growth describing its interrelationships with institutions development policies and environmental degradation and examines the sensitivity of china s trade balances and world prices to environmental and growth outcomes using six income growth and resource degradation scenarios this paper notes that hampered by chronic fiscal problems and restrictions that will be imposed when it joins the world trade organization china can meet its food supply goals by increasing reliance on international markets establishing stable trading relationships with the rest of the world and by exploiting its agricultural comparative advantage however the most likely scenario is for china to continue producing most of its own food while gradually increasing food imports without exerting severe upward pressure on the world markets the paper concludes that china needs to prioritize investments in agricultural research for new technologies raising agricultural productivity and mitigating rural environmental problems

combining revealed and stated preference data to estimate the nonmarket value of ecological services an assessment of the state of the science this paper reviews the marketing transportation and environmental economics literature on the joint estimation of revealed preference rp and stated preference sp data the rp and sp approaches are first described with a focus on the strengths and weaknesses of each recognizing these strengths and weaknesses the potential gains from combining data are described a classification system for combined data that emphasizes the type of data combination and the econometric models used is proposed a methodological review of the literature is pursued based on this classification system examples from the environmental economics literature are highlighted a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each type of jointly estimated model is then presented suggestions for future research in particular opportunities for application of these models to environmental quality valuation are presented

time is money improved valuation of time and transportation costs the proper valuation of time isimportant for estimating the demand for severaleconomic goods this paper explores the propervaluation of time when estimating recreationaldemand where time costs represent asubstantial portion of the purchase price toestimate demand this paper uses a travel costframework to analyze actual behavior revealedpreference data and hypothetical behavior stated preference data which is induced byhypothetical increases in access fees traveltime and travel distance by comparing theresponses to these three contingencies theanalysis adjusts and improves the valuation oftime costs as evidence of this improvement this analysis demonstrates a great increase inthe consistency between the revealed and stateddata similarly this paper improves thevaluation of transportation related costs

adopt a hypothetical pup a count data approach to the valuation of wildlife the willingness to pay wtp for a coyote conservation program is estimated using a novel payment vehicle based on how many problem coyotes respondents would be willing to sponsor for a year this hypothetical scenario mimics an increasingly popular type of actual market data from a phone survey conducted in prince edward island are analyzed using count data models that consider different processes explaining zero responses and the level of positive responses this is particularly important in the case of coyotes often regarded as an economic bad estimates of wtp per coyote per year around 18 22 and annual wtp per contributor of about 46 57 are obtained

optimal monetary policy with heterogeneous money holdings abstract we study the optimal anticipated policy in a pure currency economy with flexible prices and a non degenerate distribution of money holdings the economy features a business cycle and lump sum monetary injections have distributional effects that depend on the state of the cycle we parsimoniously characterize the dynamics of the economy and study the optimal regulation of the money supply as a function of the state under commitment the optimal policy prescribes monetary expansions in recessions when insurance is most needed by the cash poor unproductive agents conversely the optimal policy prescribes monetary contractions during booms so that the inflationary effect of the occasional expansions is undone

china s past and future role in the grain trade china s grain production consumption and trade are key factors in the world grain market in the 1960s china emerged as a major wheat importer and observers expect this situation to continue mainly because china has 20 of the world s population but only 7 of the earth s arable land in the early 1980s china was the second largest importer of wheat in the world ranking behind the ussr china s wheat imports then dropped off sharply in the mid 1980s but rose again in the late 1980s and this trade behavior created much uncertainty surrounding its future role in the grain trade the purpose of this article is to analyze china s historical role in the world grain markets to study the impact of the 1979 economic reforms on china s grain production consumption and trade 2 and to evaluate the probable participation of china in the grain trade in future years china is so large that regional differences in climate level of development and growth rates in grain production are substantial because of this regional heterogeneity this article attempts a disaggregated analysis of china s grain economy

an extension of omitted cross price variable biases in the linear travel cost model correcting common misperceptions caulkins bishop and bouwes cbb 1985 raise an important issue concerning the conventional presumption of positive bias in consumer surplus when alternative sites are ignored in the travel cost method treatment of site value dwyer kelly and bowes 1977 they analyze a significant geographic dispersion phenomenon which can cause either negative or positive bias in travel cost model tcm estimates of site value when travel costs to alternative sites are omitted however the derivation of specification bias in the tcm which they provide is incomplete and could lead to generalizations which are erroneous cbb use the well known specification bias analysis to discuss the possible effects of ignoring alternative recreation sites in the tcm demand analysis given the estimated linear regression equation

the economics of household solid waste generation and disposal abstract we develop a household production model of waste management that explicitly incorporates many of the technical and behavioral elements germane to current regulatory and non regulatory solid waste policy initiatives examination of first order conditions shows the interaction among household preferences these production options and external prices and fees a simplified simulation of our model illustrates these relationships showing that household response elasticities can vary widely over common price ranges and that relatively large household welfare gains may be obtained by adopting curbside recycling and unit pricing programs

valuing water level changes in reservoirs using two stated preference approaches an exploration of validity the combination of travel cost tcm and contingent behaviour cb methods is a relatively new research avenue in the recreational valuation community contrary to simple tcm applications tcm cb facilitates the ex ante valuation of marginal welfare effects resulting from environmental quality or quantity changes similar to the contingent valuation method cv even though tcm cb is highly policy relevant i e to inform changes in management regimes at recreational sites the validity of estimates has hardly received any attention and little is known about the performance of tcm cb compared to cv in this paper tcm cb and cv are explored with respect to several validity tests in a case study on the recreational effects of water level changes in a reservoir overall the findings reveal that tcm cb and cv perform equally well in terms of theoretical validity but that the marginal recreational value varies significantly between the two methods we also observe that both methods face similar internal difficulties with respect to the stability of values when the order of a set of valuation questions is changed

money capital and redistributive effects of monetary policies abstract this paper examines the redistributive role of expansionary monetary policies for this purpose a physical environment with heterogeneous agents is described to emphasize two frictions one is a within market friction that agents cannot borrow within each market the other is a cross market friction that agents cannot borrow across markets although a contractionary monetary policy is required to eliminate the within market friction as in many previous monetary models an expansionary monetary policy is required to eliminate the cross market friction when both frictions are operational no monetary policy alone can restore efficiency and the second best monetary policy requires the money growth rate to exceed the friedman rule the first best allocation can be achieved by a combination of fiscal policies and the friedman rule

inventory accumulation in a search based monetary economy abstract this paper explores the implications of a search based model of money for the linkage between steady state inventory accumulation inflation and welfare because individual traders in the search economy do not internalize the positive effects inventory accumulation and search effort have on the aggregate economy they are too low relative to social efficiency it is established that a tax on money balances can alleviate these externalities and improve aggregate welfare it does so by i directly increasing the optimal search intensity choices of the individual trader and ii stimulating the accumulation of inventories through a mundeil tobin type effect an increase in the equilibrium level of inventory accumulation also positively affects search effort the implications for optimal monetary policy are discussed

anticipated inflation and the capital stock in a cash in advance economy abstract an economy is constructed in which the steady state capital stock is inversely related to the rate of inflation as a result that is directly opposite the usual conclusion

consistency in mixed demand systems contingent valuation and travel cost data in contrast to previous literature we propose a consistency test that does not impose any particular common functional form for the preference structure underlying the travel cost tc and contingent valuation cv models we derive testable consistency conditions between tc and cv data in the context of mixed demand systems when valuing changes in environmental quality these conditions are a subset of the rationality conditions the proposed consistency tests are implemented combining tc and cv data the empirical results show that it is possible to combine stated tc and cv but not revealed tc and cv data

deficits and cycles abstract this paper shows that periodic equilibria may arise in a simple overlapping generations model with capital if the government follows a policy of fixing the value of the deficit rather than fixing the value of government debt then the difference equation that describes competitive equilibria may posses complex roots in the neighborhood of the golden rule stationary state one may show that if there exist parametric families of economies for which these roots change stability then locally there exists an invariant closed curve the paper provides two simple examples that generate such equilibria and it solves these examples numerically

using count data models in travel cost analysis with aggregate data estimators of recreational demand models frequently use continuous functional forms such as ordinary least squares ols on log transformed variables e g ziemer musser and hill however the nature of trip demand introduces complicating factors first trips occur in nonnegative quantities failure to control for this censoring will lead to biased estimation second because trips are available only in integer quantities the usual demand models which correlate marginal quantity with marginal price may be inapplicable in light of these factors a natural alternative is to use statistical models that explicitly recognize the count nature of trip demand several recent papers e g shaw smith grogger and carson creel and loomis have applied count models to the travel cost model these works largely have focused on truncated data sets based on choice based samples in this study the focus is on the older problem where zero demanders are included in particular the application of several robust estimators of count models to aggregated data will be considered the poisson distribution forms the foundation for the count models examined in this study although the poisson is a convenient distribution to work with it imposes some stringent constraints on the demand distribution in particular the poisson distribution assumes the variance of trip demand is equal to the expected value of trip demand to loosen these constraints a generalization of the poisson the negative binomial is discussed robust estimation procedures that permit further loosening of a priori assumptions are then reviewed permit data from the boundary waters canoe area are used to examine the effects of these count models on consumer surplus estimates and on coefficient variability

a contribution to the pure theory of money abstract this article analyzes a general equilibrium model with search frictions and differentiated commodities because of the many differentiated commodities barter is difficult in that it requires a double coincidence of wants and this provides a medium of exchange role for fiat currency we prove the existence of equilibrium with valued fiat money and show it is robust to certain changes in the environment rate of return dominance liquidity and the welfare implications of fiat money are discussed

the effects of variable omission in the travel cost technique the travel cost technique is probably the most widely used method for estimating outdoor recreation demand functions consequently problems of specification have attracted much attention specification errors due to the omission of travel time and congestion effects have received the most recent attention with the consensus being that the travel cost technique underestimates the true value of recreational resources if these variables are omitted gum and martin 1975 wetzel 1977 mcconnell and duff 1976 yet the effect of variable omission is likely to vary depending upon the type of activity the existence of substitutes and related factors for this reason we reexamine from both an empirical and theoretical perspective the magnitude and nature of potential specification errors due to variable omission

willingness to pay for quality improvements should revealed and stated preference data be combined abstract in this article we propose theoretically consistent welfare measurement of use and nonuse values for an improvement in environmental quality with revealed and stated preference data an analytical model based on the comparative static analysis of the variation function that describes the relationship between recreation demand and dichotomous choice contingent valuation models is estimated our results show that revealed and stated data should not be combined under the same assumed preference structure unless the two decisions imply the same change in behavior induced by the quality change in addition our results indicate scope effects in willingness to pay measures estimated with stated preference data

china s nutrient availability and sources 1950 1991 abstract the rapid changes in china s economy and data availability have led to the need for a quantitative assessment of its food and nutrient situation this paper first reports estimates of china s average per capita daily energy protein and fat availability through yearly food balance sheets for the period 1950 1991 then policy impacts on the nutrient changes are examined results suggest that china s nutritional status has improved significantly over the period especially since the 1978 economic reforms government policy has been a key factor influencing the nutrient changes since 1950 and will continue to play an important role in china s nutritional improvement

a difficulty with the travel cost method instead of observable prices of recreational visits travel cost method tcm re searchers are obliged to substitute researcher assigned visitation cost estimates i argue that visitation costs are inherently subjective but are ordinally measurable so long as the cost in creases with distance travelled it follows that traditional tcm yields only ordinally measur able welfare estimates the household produc tion function formulation of tcm resolves this problem only by imposing severe and un testable analytical restrictions tcm cannot serve as a stand alone technique for estimating recreation benefits rather it must be calibrated using information generated with fundamentally different methods jel q26

convergent validity of revealed and stated recreation behavior with quality change a comparison of multiple and single site demands we consider the convergent validity of several demand models using beach recreation data two models employ multiple site data a count data demand system model and the kuhn tucker demand system model we explore the role of existing variation in beach width in explaining trip choices and analyze a hypothetical 100 foot increase in beach width we compare these models to a single equation model where we jointly estimate revealed and stated preference trip data and focus on a hypothetical scenario considering a 100 foot increase in beach width in each case we develop estimates of the change in beach visits and the welfare impacts from the increase in width the trip change estimates from two of the three models are similar and convergent valid though the willingness to pay estimates differ in magnitude

sequential markets and the suboptimality of the friedman rule a cash in advance model with sequential markets is constructed where unanticipated monetary injections are nonneutral and can potentially produce large liquidity effects however if the monetary authority adheres to an optimal money rule money should not respond to unanticipated shocks so that a friedman rule is suboptimal and the monetary authority does not exploit the liquidity effect quantitatively the model can generate variability in money and nominal interest rates close to what is observed and can produce data with no obvious evidence of the existence of liquidity effects

liquidity a new monetarist perspective this essay surveys the new monetarist approach to liquidity work in this literature strives for empirical and policy relevance plus rigorous foundations questions include what is liquidity is money essential in achieving desirable outcomes which objects can or should serve in this capacity when can asset prices differ from fundamentals what are the functions of commitment and collateral in credit markets how does money interact with credit and intermediation what can and should monetary policy do the research summarized emphasizes the micro structure of frictional transactions and studies how institutions like monetary exchange credit arrangements or intermediation facilitate the exchange process

money barter and the optimality of legal restrictions we examine a decentralized monetary economy in which households can use a means of exchange barter or gold other than fiat money the alternative means of exchange may drive out money even if monetary exchange pareto dominates legal restrictions prohibiting other means of exchange may therefore be necessary with stochastic preferences households may use barter to supplement monetary purchases when they have an unexpectedly high demand however this may drive down the value of money in all states so low that households are again better off with fiat money alone the paper provides both stochastic and nonstochastic examples in which eliminating markets for goods or assets that compete with fiat money improves welfare

asset trading mechanisms and expansionary policy abstract previous authors have argued that the otimal monetary policy is contractionary if buyers value consumption substantially more than sellers there is some randomness and informational constraints make asset trading useful we show that there is an incentive compatible expansionary policy that dominates all incentive compatible contractionary policies