econometric issues in estimating consumer preferences from stated preference data a case study of the value of automobile travel time this paper explores a number of methodological issues related to the econometric analysis of stated preference data in the context of estimating the value of automobile travel time estimates of parameters and the willingness to pay wtp to save time are obtained using conventional ordered probit and rank ordered logit models and an innovation called mixed logit we find that the average wtp is low and does not exhibit much variation among motorists although our findings using data on respondents rankings of alternatives are robust we find that caution should be used in estimating stated preferences based on respondents ratings

the value of value pricing of roads second best pricing and product differentiation abstract some road pricing demonstrations use value pricing in which travelers can choose between a free but congested roadway and a priced roadway recent research has uncovered a potentially serious problem for such demonstrations second best tolls may be far lower than those typically charged and from a welfare perspective the latter may be worse than not pricing at all that research however assumes that all travelers are identical and it therefore neglects the benefits of product differentiation using a model with two user groups we find that accounting for heterogeneity in value of time is important in evaluating constrained policies and improves the relative performance of policies that offer differential prices

modeling charitable giving using a box cox standard tobit model there is a large literature investigating the determinants of charitable giving in particular price and income elasticities we find that many of the most often reported results from this literature rely on a model specification that is inappropriate when applied to recent federal tax file data we develop a standard tobit model with a box cox transformation parameter that nests a number of other specifications the box cox model yields estimates of price elasticities and expected charitable contributions that differ from those obtained using the typical specification additionally we find that the use of sample weights provides potentially important policy insights copyright 1991 by mit press

optimal environmental road pricing abstract an optimal first best road charge should not only be differentiated with respect to factors that affect the direct external environmental and time costs from the road user himself indirect effects such as the fact that others cars will be more polluting when congestion increases should also be taken into account

household composition income and food away from home expenditure in urban china abstract china has experienced dramatic economic growth and socio demographic changes in the last three decades including rapid urbanization and an aging society in the coming decades this paper analyses food away from home fafh consumption in urban china with respect to household composition income and other socio economic variables the data are from household surveys in six chinese cities i e beijing nanjing chengdu xi an shenyang and xiamen collected by the authors findings indicate that both household composition and income have significant effects on fafh participation and expenditures projections based upon our results suggest that fafh expenditures in urban china will continue to increase through 2050 the leading contributor to increased fafh expenditure is china s strong income growth followed by the expected rapid urbanization the aging society however will have a negative influence on fafh consumption

stated preferences over job characteristics a panel study when making choices over jobs with different characteristics what trade offs are decision makers willing to make such a question is difficult to address using typical household surveys that provide a limited amount of information on the attributes of the jobs to address this question a small but growing number of studies have turned to the use of stated preference experiments but the extent to which stated choices by respondents reflect systematic trade offs across job characteristics remains an open question we use two popular types of experiments profile case best worst scaling and multi profile case best worst scaling to elicit job preferences of nursing students and junior nurses in australia each person participated in both types of experiments twice within a span of about 15 months using a novel joint likelihood approach that links a decision maker s preferences across the two types of experiments and over time we find that the decision makers make similar trade offs across job characteristics in both types of experiments and in both time periods except for the trade off between salary and other attributes the valuation of salary falls significantly over time relative to other job attributes for both types of experiments also within each period salary is less valued in the profile case compared to the more traditional multi profile case

using revealed preferences to estimate the value of travel time to recreation sites the opportunity value of travel time vtt is one of the most important elements of the total cost of recreation day trips and arguably the most difficult to estimate most studies build upon the theoretical framework proposed by becker 1965 by using a combination of revealed and stated preference data to estimate a value of time which is uniform in all activities and under all circumstances this restriction is relaxed by deserpa s 1971 model which allows the value of saving time to be activity specific we present the first analysis which uses actual driving choices between open access and toll roads to estimate a vtt specific for recreation trips thereby providing a value which conforms to both becker s and deserpa s theoretical models using these findings we conduct a monte carlo simulation to identify generalizable results for subsequent valuation studies our results indicate that 3 4 of the wage rate provides a reasonable approximation of the average vtt for recreation trips while the commonly implemented assumption of 1 3 of the wage rate generates downward biased results

value of time speeding behavior and gasoline prices abstract value of time vot is a key parameter in economics and policy this paper presents an alternative method to estimate vot by analyzing an hourly dataset on drivers speeding behavior as a function of the gasoline price our identification strategy is novel as it is based on the intensive margin in comparison previous studies reveal vot on the extensive margin but choice alternatives have multiple attributes thereby potentially confounding estimates consistent with the range of the prior literature we find a vot of about 50 of the wage rate and analyze sources of bias from accidents and traffic tickets these bias functions suggest that previous stated preference vot estimates are likely downward whereas previous revealed preference estimates are likely upward biased

an exploration in the theory of exchange rate regimes three exchange rate regimes a float a one sided peg and a cooperative peg are evaluated and compared in terms of efficiency and welfare levels the framework of analysis embodies country specific monies with the money of each country being used to transact in its commodity markets and its currency denominated bonds welfare levels depend only on consumption levels in the presence of perfect foresight all equilibrium allocations are pareto efficient in a floating exchange rate regime the perfect foresight equilibrium allocation coincides with an equilibrium of a costless barter economy the same result holds in a one sided peg if the pegging country s exchange rate stabilizing authority breaks even over time in a cooperative peg regime there is a different equilibrium allocation for each combination of exchange rate levels and monetary policies problems of policy coordination and conflicts in desired monetary policies are discussed

a monetary approach to the crawling peg system theory and evidence this paper develops and estimates a model of the joint determination of the exchange rate international reserves and the rate of inflation under a crawling peg system the framework presented which is an extension of previous work on the monetary approach generates short run deviations from purchasing power parity that occur simultaneously with movements in both international reserves and the exchange rate the model is estimated by full information maximum likelihood on the basis of quarterly data for brazil

estimating a brand level demand system for american cheese products to evaluate unilateral and coordinated market power strategies the advantage of this method compared to baker and bresnahan p 432 is that it does not constrain the conduct of the manager in their analysis they assume that the manager proportionally varies the quantity of each brand market shares remain constant once one has the unilateral total and fully collusive elasticities one can analyze the this paper was presented at the assa winter meetings atlanta ga january 2002 papers in these sessions are not subjected to the journal s standard refereeing process ronald w cotterill is professor of agricultural economics at the university of connecticut department of agricultural and resource economics he is currently director of the food marketing policy center and editor of agribusiness an international journal pierre o samson completed a master of science degree in agricultural economics at the university of connecticut in 2000

exchange rate management intertemporal tradeoffs exchange rate management is possible only if the government pursues consistent monetary and fiscal policies the authors constructa model in which the real consequences of exchange rate management depend on the precise time pattern of these policies the authors study the constraints on feasible policies and the comparative dynamics of disinflation by means of exchange rate targeting theoretical results are consistent with exchange rate managed disinflation attempts in argentina chile and israel copyright 1987 by american economic association

a double hurdle model of irish household expenditure on prepared meals in this paper irish households expenditure on prepared meals for home consumption is analysed using the 1987 and 1994 irish household budget survey datasets the aim of the paper is to analyse the factors influencing irish households decisions to purchase prepared meals and how much to spend on these food items this is done using the double hurdle methodology adjusted for the problems of heteroscedasticity and non normality income elasticities are estimated for household expenditure on prepared meals in both years and significant socioeconomic influences are identified these socioeconomic factors are assumed to underpin the tastes and preferences of irish households with convenience identified as a significant preference of many household groups

the effect of residential location on retirement age theory and some evidence on male behaviour in the us retirement age choice is introduced into a conventional model of residential location to show that the retirement age of workers who do not move after retirement can be influenced by the urban variation of leisure and housing prices a retirement demand equation that incorporates commuting characteristics is estimated on a sample of us urban male owners interviewed by the panel study of income dynamics it is found that commuters retire around two years earlier than comparable home based workers although the evidence provides no support for this gap to be the result of differences in leisure or housing prices across both groups

traffic and crime abstract we study the link between crime and extreme traffic congestion to estimate the psychological costs of traffic our empirical analysis combines police incident reports with observations of local traffic data in los angeles from 2011 to 2015 this rich dataset allows us to link traffic with criminal activity at a fine spatial and temporal dimension our identification relies on deviations from normal traffic to isolate the impact of abnormally high traffic on crime we find that extreme traffic increases the incidence of domestic violence a crime shown to be affected by emotional cues but not other crimes the result is robust to a variety of specifications and falsification tests the results represent a lower bound of the psychological costs of traffic congestion since most drivers stuck in traffic do not commit domestic violence but still bear some emotional costs

the effects of new public projects to expand urban rail transit abstract many us cities invest in large public transit projects in order to reduce private vehicle dependence and to reverse the downward trend in public transit use using a unique panel data set for five major cities that upgraded their rail transit systems in the 1980s we estimate new rail transit s impact on usage and housing values using distance as a proxy for transit access new rail transit has a small impact on usage and housing values this impact is enough to represent tangible benefits of new transit to nearby residents new transit s benefits are not uniformly distributed we document which demographic groups are over represented in transit growth areas and the changes in transit usage by different demographic groups

the political economy of urban transport system choice this paper analyzes the political economy of transport system choice with the goal of gaining an understanding of the forces involved in this important urban public policy decision transport systems pose a continuous trade off between time and money cost so that a city can choose a fast system with a high money cost per mile or a slower cheaper system the paper compares the socially optimal transport system to the one chosen under the voting process focusing on both homogeneous and heterogeneous cities while considering different landownership arrangements the analysis identifies a bias toward underinvestment in transport quality in heterogeneous cities

contingent valuation a practical alternative when prices aren t available a person may be willing to make an economic tradeoff to assure that a wilderness area or scenic resource is protected even if neither that person nor perhaps anyone else will actually visit this area this tradeoff is commonly labeled passive use value contingent valuation studies ask questions that help to reveal the monetary tradeoff each person would make concerning the value of goods or services such surveys are a practical alternative approach for eliciting the value of public goods including those with passive use considerations first i discuss the exxon valdez oil spill of march 1989 focusing on why it is important to measure monetary tradeoffs for goods where passive use considerations loom large although discussions of contingent valuation often focus on whether the method is sufficiently reliable for use in assessing natural resource damages in lawsuits it is important to remember that most estimates from contingent valuation studies are used in benefit cost assessments not natural resource damage assessments those working on benefit cost analysis have long recognized that goods and impacts that cannot be quantified are valued implicitly by giving them a limitless value when government regulations preclude certain activities or giving them a value of zero by leaving certain consequences out of the analysis contingent valuation offers a practical alternative for reducing the use of either of these extreme choices i put forward an affirmative case for contingent valuation and address a number of the concerns that have arisen

household consumption of cheese an inverse hyperbolic sine double hurdle model with dependent errors the dependent double hurdle model is generalized by an inverse hyperbolic sine transformation of the dependent variable the resulting specification features a flexible parameterization accommodates heteroskedastic errors and nests a range of common limited dependent variable models results for u s household cheese consumption suggest that the homoskedastic and normal double hurdle model is misspecified income elasticities are small and vary across household groups foodstamp recipients are more responsive to income changes than nonrecipients foodstamp recipients are also less likely to consume cheese but conditional on consumption spend more than nonrecipients

recovering individual preferences for non market goods a collective travel cost model traditional recreation demand models do not make a distinction between a household and an individual as the reference decision making unit thus assuming that a family maximizes a single utility function even if the family consists of different individuals such models ignore the possibility of family members divergent preferences for non market goods this study proposes a novel approach the collective travel cost model ctcm to eliciting individual preferences for a non market good such as a recreation site by using revealed preference data this approach accounts for the intra household resource allocation and the role of each household member s preferences we show that the collective travel cost model can be applied to estimating a recreation demand model that yields individual welfare estimates appropriate for policy analysis of non market goods such as the willingness to pay to access a recreation site we find that how resources are distributed within the household reflects significant differences in welfare measures

workers marginal costs of commuting abstract this paper applies a dynamic search model to estimate workers marginal costs of commuting including monetary and time costs using data on workers job search activity as well as moving behaviour for the netherlands we provide evidence that on average workers marginal costs of one hour of commuting are about 17 euro

infrastructure investment a review essay economists try not to be faddists but they often cannot help themselves while work on a topic should mirror the prospective importance of the topic that situation seems to occur with disappointing frequency instead the usual pattern is that some reasonably important topic will be totally ignored for the longest time then recognized and then the subject of a flurry of work all out of proportion to its likely long run importance nowhere has this speculative bubble of economic research been more clearly illustrated than with infrastructure investment macroeconomists havelong felt that the stock of public capital is an important factor input in the production of total output macroeconomists have known that u s productivity growth slowed dramatically in about 1973 and macroeconomists should have known that united states investment in public capital has been down since the late 1960s yet analysis of the u s productivity slowdown completely ignored infrastructure investment for the first fifteen years of this slowdown concentrating instead on energy prices social regulation the composition of the work force research and development different rates of obsolescence of the private capital stock and any number of other matters the public capital stock was hardly ever even mentioned as a potential factor in the productivity slowdown aschauer changed all that he wrote a series of papers 1989a 1989b 1989c that put these two movements together econometrically infrastructure investment turned down and aggregate productivity turned down slightly later both in the united states and in some other developed countries his work hit the magic button those who had worried about the productivity puzzle for fifteen years welcomed a new suspect those who were worried about low rates of u s national saving welcomed a new way to make their argument even more forcefully than with official figures on saving and investment which do not count infrastructure investment as investment political liberals and liberal politicians saw a way to rescue government spending and projects from the assaults of reaganism and even a way to avoid oth

balance of payments crises and devaluation the collapse of a fixed exchange rate is typically marked by a sudden balance of payments crisis in which speculators fleeing from the domestic currency acquire a large portion of the central bank s foreign exchange holdings faced with such an attack the central bank often withdraws temporarily from the foreign exchange market allowing the exchange rate to float freely before devaluing and returning to a fixed rate regime this paper links the timing of the initial speculative attack to the magnitude of the expected devaluation and to the length of the transitional period off loating an implication of the analysis is that there exist devaluations so sharp and transition periods so short that acrisis must occur the moment the market first learns that the current exchange parity will eventually be altered for sufficiently long transition periods the floating exchange rate overshoots its new peg before appreciating back toward it for shorter periods the rate depreciates monotonically to its new fixed level accordingly the central bank s return tothe foreign exchange market can occasion a capital outflow or a capital inflow this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

payments for ecosystem services programs predicting landowner enrollment and opportunity cost using a beta binomial model this paper concerns predicting enrollment in payment for ecosystem services pes programs to promote habitat preservation on private lands we develop a beta binomial model to address both program participation and the amount of land enrolled by each potential enrollee we apply the estimation approach to stated preference data from non industrial private forest owners in finland as an alternative econometric model we also develop a multivariate censored regression model of enrollments using cross validation we find that the beta binomial model predicts at least as well as the multivariate censored model yet has fewer parameters using our estimation results we demonstrate policy predictions regarding program enrollment and landowner opportunity cost

menu costs and the neutrality of money a model of endogenous price adjustment under money growth is presented firms follow s s pricing policies and price revisions are imperfectly synchronized in the aggregate price stickiness disappears and money is neutral the connection between firm price adjustment and relative price variability in the presence of monetary growth is also investigated the results contrast with those obtained in models with exogenous fixed timing of price adjustment

working wives and food away from home the box cox double hurdle model household expenditures on food away from home are analyzed with the use of the bls 1989 consumer expenditure survey parameterization and distributional assumptions of cragg s double hurdle model are generalized for this purpose and the resulting model outperforms the more traditional ones results suggest households with working wives and those with higher income are more likely to consume food away from home and also to consume more than others wife s age and household size increase the conditional level of consumption education has conflicting effects on probability and conditional level of consumption

willingness to pay for snowmobile recreation travel cost method models with and without post season resurvey of trip count annual willingness to pay wtp for snowmobile recreation in idaho is estimated using the travel cost method tcm on site snow conditions are important and erratic thus we collect two measures o

temporary stabilization predetermined exchange rates the paper analyzes the impact of a stabilization policy based on a temporary reduction in the rate of devaluation against a background in which a constant rate of devaluation has no real effects it is shown that the temporary policy does and furthermore that the real effects tend to become bigger in absolute value as the horizon of the temporary policy is shortened the central discussion is carried out in terms of a one good cash in advance model with perfect capital mobility and ramsey type consumers results are extended to account for home goods and variable velocity the roles of capital mobility and banking liberalization are briefly discussed

at home consumption of cheese a purchase infrequency model for many commodities zero purchases are recorded in household budget surveys even though positive consumption occurs this may reflect a survey period that is shorter than the purchase cycle the present study estimates a purchase infrequency model for cheese using the 1987 bls consumer expenditure survey appropriateness of the tobit specification is examined along with the assumption of independence of the two stage expenditure decision process applied consumption analyses often use household budget surveys with little concern as to survey period length relative to the length over which consumption can occur many of these analyses use the tobit model to account for censoring associated with use of this type of model are underlying assumptions that first the same stochastic process affects both purchase decisions and consumption levels and second a zero value of the dependent variable represents a true comer solution however when the commodity in question has a purchase cycle longer than the survey period length a zero expenditure level may not correspond to zero consumption and the tobit specification may be inappropriate blundell and meghir p 197 as a commodity cheese may exhibit characteristics precluding use of a tobit demand model for many cheese varieties consumption may occur many weeks after purchase as evidence the 1972 and 1987 consumer expenditure surveys report that 48 and 42 of surveyed households respectively had purchased cheese over a one week survey period in contrast the 1977 usda household food consumption survey indicates over 75 of surveyed households had consumed cheese at home over a one week period this large difference

when should drivers be encouraged to carpool in hov lanes policies to encourage carpooling in high occupancy vehicle hov lanes have been adopted in the united states to lower congestion and reduce air pollution we analytically model highway congestion and other vehicle related externalities encouraging carpooling decreases total costs when congestion relief in mainline lanes outweighs increased hov lane congestion importantly entry of new drivers via induced demand can negate the benefits of increased carpooling using 10 years of traffic data from los angeles we estimate time and route specific marginal external costs because costs vary substantially across routes hours and days current policies to promote carpooling will often increase social costs jel r41 r48 q53

universal health insurance in the clinton plan coverage as a tax financed public good the financing arrangements embodied in the clinton health reform plan involve some important differences in the way in which public goods are usually financed the subsidies to small low wage firms mandated to provide benefits distort markets in both labor and products and offer incentives for the creation of small firms in addition the financing scheme implicitly envisions a head tax on families at modest income levels but offers a possible rationale for it nevertheless the main reason for many of the financing features appears to be an attempt to hold down the apparent budgetary cost of universal coverage

real balances the exchange rate and indexation real variables in disinflation the paper shows first that real exchange rate appreciation typically reduces but may increase the output costs of disinflation the direct favorable effects of cheaper imports on consumer prices on the prices of imported inputs on wage demands and on the demand for money may be outweighed by the unemployment caused by the trade deficit second the effects of wage indexation on the costs of disinflation are reexamined ex ante indexation speeds up disinflation ex post indexation the type observed in practice automatically increases the real wage at the start of a disinflation and may therefore increase the sacrifice ratio

the value of commuting time in an empirical on the job search model an application based on moments from two samples this article estimates the value of commuting time voct among swedish males in an empirical on the job search model it uses a large sample of employee establishment linked data obtained from administrative registers the sample lacks information on mode choice for the journey to work we therefore estimate a mode choice model on another sample and use this model to link the administrative data to the relevant set of travel times costs and distances the voct is found to be 1 8 times the net hourly wage rate in the sample the relatively high estimate results from a high voct among cohabiting men

the trade off between money and travel time a test of the theory of reference dependent preferences we formulate a model of reference dependent preferences based on the marginal rate of substitution at the reference point of a reference free utility function using binary choices on the trade off between money and travel time reference dependence is captured by value functions that are centered at the reference the model predicts a directly testable relationship among four commonly used valuation measures willingness to pay wtp willingness to accept wta equivalent gain eg and equivalent loss el moreover we show that the model allows recovering the underlying reference free value of time based on a large survey data set we estimate an econometric version of the model allowing for both observed and unobserved heterogeneity in a series of tests of high statistical power we find that the relationship among the four valuation measures conforms to our model and that the constraints on the parameters implied by the model are met the gap between wtp and wta is found to be a factor of four loss aversion plays an important role in explaining responses moreover participants are more loss averse in the time dimension than the cost dimension we further find evidence of asymmetrically diminishing sensitivity finally we show that the fraction of mistakes in the sense that participants are observed to sometimes select dominated options varies systematically in a way consistent with the model of reference dependence the results of the paper have important implications for the evaluation of infrastructure investment and pricing reforms in the transport sector

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

a box cox double hurdle model of wildlife valuation the citizen s perspective abstract a stated preference approach is used to elicit the attitudes of the general public towards coyote conservation the payment vehicle is presented in a way that explicitly prompts respondents to adopt a citizen perspective rather than a consumer perspective when responding to the survey to deal with the large numbers of zero responses a box cox double hurdle specification is used to model separately individuals choices about whether to support conservation or not and their choice about the level of support the results show that simpler analyses that do not account explicitly for these two different decisions would lead to misleading conclusions in the study of nuisance wildlife the study uses primary data from prince edward island canada

winning or losing from dynamic bottleneck congestion pricing the distributional effects of road pricing with heterogeneity in values of time and schedule delay abstract this paper analyses the efficiency and distributional impacts of congestion pricing in vickrey s 1969 dynamic bottleneck model of congestion allowing for continuous distributions of values of time and schedule delay we find that congestion pricing can leave a majority of travellers better off even without returning the toll revenues to them we also find that the consumer surplus losses or gains from tolling are not strictly monotonic in the value of time because they also depend on the value of schedule delays the greatest losses are not incurred by drivers with the lowest value of time but by users with an intermediate value of schedule delays and the lowest value of time for that value of schedule delays for second best pricing with an untolled alternative the pattern of distributional effects is quite similar to that for first best pricing in contrast with results from prior static models users who are indifferent between the two alternative routes are not the ones who gain least from this type of second best pricing our results suggest that in assessing the distributional impacts of road congestion pricing it is important to take into account both the distribution of the value of time and of the value of schedule delays as well as the dynamics of departure time choice

coupon redemption and its effect on household cheese purchases by endogenizing unit value and coupon redemption we estimate u s household cheese purchase quality choice and coupon redemption equations simultaneously zero purchases and missing values on coupons and unit values are taken into account in the model to correct for selectivity bias correlations among the three equations are found to be significant empirical findings show that high quality choice significantly decreases cheese purchases while cheese coupon usage significantly increases purchases we find that higher income households select higher quality cheese while larger households choose lower quality cheese for coupon redemption we find that african american and hispanic households redeem less while asian households have no significant difference compared to caucasian households

excise tax avoidance the case of state cigarette taxes we conduct an applied welfare economics analysis of cigarette tax avoidance we develop an extension of the standard formula for the optimal pigouvian corrective tax to incorporate the possibility that consumers avoid the tax by making purchases in nearby lower tax jurisdictions to provide a key parameter for our formula we estimate a structural endogenous switching regression model of border crossing and cigarette prices in illustrative calculations we find that for many states after taking into account tax avoidance the optimal tax is at least 20 smaller than the standard pigouvian tax that simply internalizes external costs our empirical estimate that tax avoidance strongly responds to the price differential is the main reason for this result we also use our results to examine the benefits of replacing avoidable state excise taxes with a harder to avoid federal excise tax on cigarettes

do the poor pay more for food evidence from the united kingdom does food cost more for low income households this paper compares two well known approaches to answering this question i find that quantity discounts for a broad range of foods are statistically significant and economically important however quantity discounting does not lead to the poor paying more for food i find that the poor pay less than average for the food they purchase this is explained by the poor spending a greater share of their income on foods where quantity discounting occurs copyright 2010 oxford university press

the effect of household wealth on the adoption of improved maize varieties in zambia abstract production and price risks that could render input use unprofitable sometimes prevent rural households from benefiting from input technological change the household s ability to cope with such risks and hence benefit from input technological change is often positively related to its wealth or stock of productive assets empirical evidence however suggests a non linear relationship between wealth and adoption of new agricultural technologies so that within a rural community households on the lower wealth continuum behave differently from those on the higher level using farm level data collected from 300 randomly selected households in three districts of zambia in 2004 2005 crop season this paper first stratifies households into poorly and well endowed households based on their access to productive assets and estimates separate double hurdle models for the adoption of improved high yielding maize ihym varieties for each group the results show that factors influencing the adoption and use intensity of ihym varieties differ between the two groups this draws attention to the need for recommending wealth group specific interventions to increase the adoption and use intensity of such varieties and their subsequent impacts on food security and general livelihoods of the households the explicit testing for the possibility that differences in household wealth affect the way in which other variables influence adoption decisions is the paper s unique contribution to the adoption literature

exports from a remote developed region analysed by an inverse hyperbolic sine transformation of the gravity model picture a small open economy alone in the middle of the atlantic ocean and highly dependent on trade with nafta and the eu how important are these trading blocs to the country s exports how significant is the country s isolation and small size and how do these affect the export sectors typically the export volume is significantly impacted by the economic size of the exporting country but in this case it is not this suggests that the exports from small remote economies are driven by different factors than exports from large economies the data are analysed using a unique transformation of the gravity model by an inverse hyperbolic sine function allowing for accountancy of scattered exports

carpooling and driver responses to fuel price changes evidence from traffic flows in los angeles abstract we examine carpooling and driver responses to fuel price changes using a simple theoretical model we show that traffic flows in mainline lanes unambiguously decrease when fuel prices increase and this effect is stronger when the presence of a carpool lane provides a substitute to driving alone in contrast in carpool hov lanes flow can either increase or decrease these predictions are tested using 8 years of traffic flow data for 1700 locations in los angeles in our preferred specification the mean elasticity of flow with respect to fuel price is 0 136 for hov lanes for a 10 increase in fuel price this implies 10 additional carpools per hour 8 8 million per year in additional congestion costs for carpoolers and 11 3 million lower costs for mainline drivers for mainline lanes flow elasticities are 0 083 and 0 050 for highways with and without an hov lane these estimates imply that the mean highway with an hov lane experiences a 30 larger decrease in hourly flow compared to the mean highway without an hov lane flows in hov lanes show an immediate decrease following a price increase but respond positively to price increases over time which suggests time is an important input to carpool formation

is public expenditure productive abstract this paper considers the relationship between aggregate productivity and stock and flow government spending variables the empirical results indicate that i the nonmilitary public capital stock is dramatically more important in determining productivity than is either the flow of nonmilitary or military spending ii military capital bears little relation to productivity and iii a core infrastructure of streets highways airports mass transit sewers water systems etc has most explanatory power for productivity the paper also suggests an important role for the net public capital stock in the productivity slowdown of the last fifteen years

the demand for alcoholic beverages in spain the objective of this study is to analyze the main determinants of alcoholic beverages consumption at home data comes from the latest spanish household national survey which provides information on expenditure and quantities of different food products by household because households are interviewed only 1 week a large number of zeros have been recorded among the existing censured demand models the double hurdle dh model the purchase infrequency model and the tobit purchase infrequency model among others and after carrying out model selection tests the dh model has been finally estimated all expenditure elasticities are positive corresponding the highest value to spirits own price elasticities are negative and also in this case the spirits exhibit the highest value socio economic variables also play an important role in explaining consumer purchase and consumption decisions

uncovering the distribution of motorists preferences for travel time and reliability we apply recent econometric advances to study the distribution of commuters preferences for speedy and reliable highway travel our analysis applies mixed logit to combined revealed and stated preference data on commuter choices of whether to pay a toll for congestion free express travel we find that motorists exhibit high values of travel time and reliability and substantial heterogeneity in those values we suggest that road pricing policies designed to cater to such varying preferences can improve efficiency and reduce the disparity of welfare impacts compared with recent pricing experiments

learning and fatigue effects revisited investigating the effects of accounting for unobservable preference and scale heterogeneity using multiple choice tasks per respondent in discrete choice experiment studies increases the amount of available information however respondents learning and fatigue may lead to changes in observed utility function preference taste parameters as well as the variance in its error term scale they need to be controlled to avoid potential bias a sizable body of empirical research offers mixed evidence in terms of whether these ordering effects are observed we point to a significant component in explaining these differences we show how accounting for unobservable preference and scale heterogeneity can influence the magnitude of observed ordering effects

capital mobility and devaluation in an optimizing model with rational expectations this paper examines the effects of ex change rate policies when individuals maximize lifetime utility on the basis of rational expectations about the future the economy studied is one in which the authorities allow free mobility of capital under a crawling peg exchange rate regime many industrializing economies have adopted a crawling peg as a means of reconciling disparate inflation rates at home and abroad and some recent efforts to use the rate of crawl as an instrument of anti inflation policy have attracted considerable interest see carlos diaz alejandro tools similar to those employed here have been applied by guillermo calvo forthcoming to study this type of exchange rate management under conditions of capital immobility this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

capital controls and fiscal policy in the world economy an intertemporal utility maximization framework is employed to model a world economy with capital controls the effects of fiscal policy in such an environment are examined several results emerge concerning the international transmission of fiscal policy under capital controls and the nature of comovements in macro economic aggregates such as output employment consumption and investment some of the paper s other results concern the implications of capital controls for ricardian equivalence the role of financing decisions in the international transmission process under capital controls and the effect of capital controls on the magnitude of fiscal induced fluctuations throughout the world economy contr6les des mouvements de capitaux et politique fiscale dans l conomie mondiale les auteurs utilisent une approche par la maximisation intertemporelle de l utilite pour modeliser une economie mondiale dans laquelle des controles sur les mouvements de capitaux existent ils examinent les effets de la politique fiscale dans un tel contexte on tire de ces analyses plusieurs resultats quant i la transmission internationale des effets de la politique fiscale et quant aux mouvements lies de certains agregats economiques comme les niveaux de production d emploi de consommation et d investissement certains autres resultats de cette analyse ont trait aux implications des controles des mouvements de capitaux sur l1 quivalence ricardienne au role des decisions de financement dans le processus international de transmission quand il y a controle des mouvements de capitaux et aux effets des controles sur les mouvements de capitaux sur la magnitude des fluctuations induites a travers l economie mondiale par la politique fiscale helpful comments from two anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged discussion in workshops held at ucla duke university iowa state university queen s university vanderbilt university vpi and the university of western ontario has also been useful canadian journal of economics revue canadienine d economique xviii no 4 november novembre 1985 printed in canada imprime au canada 0008 4085 85 743 65 1 50 canadian economics association this content downloaded from 207 46 13 129 on mon 27 jun 2016 05 25 03 utc all use subject to http about jstor org terms 744 jeremy greenwood and kent p kimbrough

a double hurdle model of cigarette consumption this paper shows the importance of the double hurdle approach for modelling individuals cigarette consumption using data from the uk general household survey and argues that participation and consumption should be treated as separate individual choices the likelihood function for the full double hurdle is derived and it is shown how restrictions on the stochastic specification of the model and auxillary information which identifies ex smokers allow it to be decomposed the empirical results highlight the value of the sample separation information and the need to model starting and quitting as separate decisions

transport tax reform commuting and endogenous values of time abstract we consider a model of urban transport with two trip purposes commuting assumed perfectly complementary to labour supply and noncommuting to analyse the effects of transport tax reform on the value of time and marginal external congestion costs higher commuting taxes plausibly reduce time values but higher noncommuting transport prices will typically raise the value of time the intuition for this latter finding is that the reduction in congestion that follows from the tax increase itself raises net wages per hour of work inclusive of commuting time empirical illustrations with belgian data show a potentially large effect of transport tax reform on time values in quite a few of the tax reforms studied traffic levels are reduced but the increase in time values implies that marginal external congestion costs actually increase

fundamental flaws of social regulation the case of airplane noise abstract this article provides an economic assessment of federal regulatory policy toward airplane noise as encapsulated in the 1990 airport noise and capacity act anca this act mandated the elimination of certain aircraft such as the boeing 727 and dc 9 from all u s airports by the end of 1999 to meet quieter noise requirements we find that the present discounted benefits of the anca reflected in higher property values for homeowners fall 5 billion short of the anca s cost to airlines reflected in the reduced economic life of their capital stock more fundamentally we find that the net benefits that could have been generated by an economically optimal airplane noise tax amount to only 0 2 billion present value it appears that noise regulations have generated substantial costs to society when in fact there was little justification on efficiency grounds for regulatory intervention in the first place

identifying demand parameters in the presence of unobservables a combined revealed and stated preference approach we develop a combined revealed and stated preference approach to identify discrete choice demand parameters in the presence of unobserved determinants of choice our approach overcomes difficulties associated with small choice sets multicollinearity and endogeneity that arise with revealed preference approaches to illustrate our framework we revisit two canadian moose hunting datasets our empirical results suggest the potential gains from fusing revealed and stated preference data but they also suggest its limitations when the data generating processes for the data sources differ

a generalized double hurdle model of swedish gambling expenditures this article estimates the relationship between demand for swedish gambling income and the other socioeconomic variables using empirical models of participation and gambling expenditure it also indirectly attempts to account for the effect of a recent recession on gambling behaviour by examining gambling behaviour when the economy was growing versus the period immediately after a major recession the aim of the article is to analyse the factors influencing gambling decisions this is done using the double hurdle method adjusted for the problems of heteroscedasticity and nonnormality using an approach that can handle extreme values and address skewness the empirical results ruled out tobit type models and normally distributed double hurdle models the pattern on income elasticities across income classes implies that implicit swedish gaming taxes are regressive income elasticities become smaller after the recession and the decision to participate changed with respect to the several of the demographic va

wages and commuting quasi natural experiments evidence from firms that relocate we examine individual level compensating differentials for commuting distance in a quasi natural experiment setting by examining how wages respond to changes in commuting distance induced by firm relocations this set up enables us to test for the relevance of job search frictions within labour market models due to the quasi experimental set up we are able to avoid a range of endogeneity issues we demonstrate that a 1 km increase in commuting distance induces an almost negligible wage increase in the year after the relocation but a more substantial wage increase of about 0 15 three years later 2013 royal economic society

the value of automobile travel time implications for congestion policy abstract public policy has remained stoutly resistant to the economic profession s call to use congestion tolls to minimize the social costs from automobile congestion this paper explores this issue by using stated preference models to estimate the value that commuters are willing to pay to save travel time we find that this value is low and surprisingly insensitive to travel conditions and how toll revenues are used it appears that even high income commuters having adjusted to congestion through their modal residential workplace and departure time choices simply do not value travel time savings enough to benefit substantially from tolls

pareto improvements from lexus lanes the effects of pricing a portion of the lanes on congested highways abstract though economists have long advocated road pricing as an efficiency enhancing solution to traffic congestion it has rarely been implemented primarily because it is thought to create losers as well as winners this paper shows that a judiciously designed toll applied to a portion of the lanes of a highway can generate a pareto improvement before using the revenue a sufficient condition being that drivers with a high value of time travel at the peak of rush hour i obtain these new theoretical results by extending a standard dynamic congestion model to reflect an important additional traffic externality extra traffic does not simply increase travel times but also introduces frictions that reduce throughput the analysis draws attention to a practical policy that may help overcome the widespread opposition to road pricing

optimum pricing policy under stochastic inflation we describe aggregate inflation as a stochastic process in which the rate of change of the price level can be positive or zero where the times spent in each state are of random duration this class of processes includes two state markov chains and renewal processes as special cases it is shown that the optimal pricing policy of a monopolistic firm with non convex costs of price adjustment is s s in its real price i e its nominal price relative to the price level a basic certainty equivalence result is proved i e the firm behaves as if it faces a certain and fixed rate of inflation higher than the actual expected rate the difference between the two rates being a risk premium which depends on the real interest rate and the parameters of the stochastic process one can thus apply previous results from the case of certainty sheshinski and weiss review of economic studies 1977 to obtain comparative static results in particular one finds that an increase in the variance of expected inflation leads firms to choose a pricing policy with larger amplitude in real price the paper also addresses the question of consistency in firms expectations when the price level is determined by the firms actions in this paper we consider pricing policies of individual firms in an inflationary environment each firm expects the general price level to increase and must determine the rate of increase of its own price it is assumed that the firm incurs an adjustment cost when it changes its nominal price consequently firms choose to change prices occasionally rather than continuously

exchange controls capital controls and international financial markets this paper examines the effects of restrictions on international financial m arkets in a general equilibrium rational expectations model of a two country world state contingent financial markets allow households t o allocate wealth optimally across states so that the imposition of e xchange and capital controls has roughly speaking only substitution effects but no wealth effect taxes or quantitative controls on purc hases of foreign currency and on the income from foreign assets reduc e international trade in goods lower ex post welfare in the country in which they are imposed and affect nominal prices and the exchange rate copyright 1988 by american economic association

testing ricardian neutrality with an intertemporal stochastic model this paper s purpose is to develop and estimate a stochastic intertemporal model of consumption be havior and to use it for testing a version of the ricardian equivalen ce proposition with time series data two channels that may give rise to deviations from this proposition are specified finite horizons a nd liquidity constraints in addition the model incorporates explici tly the roles of taxes substitution between public and private consu mption and different degrees of consumer goods durability the evid ence based on data for israel in the first half of the 1980s suppor ts the ricardian neutrality specification yielding plausible estimat es for the behavioral parameters of the aggregate consumption functio n copyright 1988 by ohio state university press

white knuckle externalities i introduction urban motorists are well acquainted with the frustrations of traffic congestion as calfee and winston 1998 put it everyone knows the toll congestion can take on drivers nerves and everyone knows how costly it can be in terms of wasted time and lost productivity this statement illustrates two distinct externalities that are generated during a typical rush hour commute first congested travel is simply unpleasant 1 second congested travel means delayed travel economists have devoted considerable attention to estimating travel delay externalities and the marginal value of travel time savings often referred to as the value of time vot typically dominates the estimation of highway improvement benefits small 1992 the sheer unpleasantness of congestion however has received little attention presumably because it is difficult to quantify or even observe yet it may represent a substantial portion of the wedge between the social and the private costs of highway travel for example consider this familiar scenario a ball game or concert lets out spectators flock to their vehicles and parking lot gridlock ensues several motorists decide to stay put turn on the radio and wait it out for these motorists the cost of delayed travel is dominated by another distinct cost one that is difficult to observe but is certainly palpable for rush hour commuters schedule delay costs are too large for most motorists to wait it out and this additional congestion cost must be incurred there is no conventional label for such costs so the term white knuckle costs is introduced here to describe them 2 the existence of white knuckle costs helps to explain a recurring finding that the value of time increases with the severity of congestion hensher 2001 small et al 1999 wardman 2001 for instance wardman s 2001 meta analysis of several vot studies finds that time spent in congested traffic is valued 48 more highly than time spent in free flowing conditions suggesting that more difficult driving conditions linked with greater stress frustration and perhaps travel time uncertainty lead to higher time valuations the finding provides an initial gauge on the size of these white knuckle costs and suggests that traditional vot estimates may reflect them to some extent how successfully these vot estimates capture white knuckle costs however depends on the degree to which they are correlated with travel delay costs unfortunately in such studies no precise method has been offered for disentangling travel delay and white knuckle influences as such there has been no way to determine how closely vot estimates approximate the value of both reduced travel time and relief from other knuckle whitening factors moreover separate estimates would allow for a more thorough understanding of how the stress and frustration of congestion compare to the travel delays it causes this paper exploits a unique set of toll road data to obtain separate estimates for travel delay and white knuckle costs so that their magnitudes can be compared this is accomplished by analyzing the real world trade offs that rush hour commuters make between congested travel and uncongested travel for a fee holding constant the influence of travel times on this choice 3 the basic idea is that both travel times and unobservable influences such as stress and frustration naturally increase with congestion by simultaneously estimating the influences of congestion and travel time on route choice the resulting value of reduced congestion is purified of travel time influences thus revealing the value of nontime factors that cause white knuckles likewise the value of time is purified of white knuckle influences revealing the pure opportunity cost of motorists time applying these valuations to a suitable travel cost framework yields separate estimates of travel delay externalities and white knuckle externalities where the latter measures the unobservable externalities that motorists generate during congested travel

stabilization with exchange rate management stabilization programs in open economies typically consist of two stages in the first stage the rate of currency devaluation is reduced but the fiscal adjustment does not eliminate the fiscal deficit that causes growth of debt and loss of reserves making a future policy change necessary only later at a second stage is this followed by either an abandonment of exchange rate management or by a sufficiently large cut in the fiscal deficit we study how different second stage policy changes affect economic dynamics during the first stage these changes include tax increases budget cuts on traded and nontraded goods and increases in the growth rate of money

sovereign wealth funds cross border investments assessing the role of country level drivers and spatial competition abstract the aim of this paper is to identify the driving forces of cross border investments emanating from sovereign wealth funds and to test the existence of spatial competition among recipient countries for this we develop an original econometric framework that quantifies the role of spatial dependence in the location of investments and that uses a modified version of the standard estimation procedure of spatial panel model which accommodates the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation of the dependent variable this transformation copes with two critical features of net capital flows namely an highly skewed distribution and the presence of zero and negative values using a large scale database we provide evidence of negative spatial dependence investments in one country being on average at the expense of its neighbors

revenue recycling and the welfare effects of road pricing the authors explore the interaction between taxes on work related traffic congestion and preexisting distortionary taxes in the labor market a congestion tax raises the overall costs of commuting to work and discourages labor force participation at the margin when revenues are returned in lump sum transfers the resulting efficiency loss in the labor market can be larger that the pigouvian efficiency gains from internalizing the congestion externality by contrast if congestion tax revenues are used to reduce labor taxes the net impact on the labor supply is positive and the efficiency gain in the labor market can raise the overall welfare gains of the congestion tax by as much as 100 percent recycling congestion tax revenues in public transit subsidies produces a positive but smaller impact on the labor supply in short the authors results indicate that the presence of preexisting tax distortions and the form of revenue recycling can crucially affect the size and possibly even the sign of the welfare effect of road pricing schemes the efficiency gains from recycling congestion tax revenues in other tax reductions can amount to several times the pigouvian welfare gains from congestion reduction

incorporating nutrients into meat demand analysis using household budgets data the objective of this article is to analyze the spanish demand for meat taking into account the consumer s concern about the relationship between food diet and health this concern is forcing food demand analysts to assume that consumer utility is a function of nutrients instead of simply the food products themselves nevertheless these utility function arguments are not produced in the marketplace but rather at home as a consequence in this article household production theory is followed in order to analyze spanish demand for meat using the quarterly national expenditure survey for 1999 demands for several meat products the input in the model are derived from the translog cost function censored regression models are used in the estimation process since many zero responses are reported five broad categories eight nutrients and the most relevant socioeconomic variables are considered finally a set of elasticities is calculated with respect to all the variables included in the analysis

u s cigarette consumption the case of low income women we use double hurdle or cragg models to test whether decisions about smoking participation and consumption levels are separate endogenous choices we also estimate several dominance models which assume that standard corner solutions are not applicable a complete dominance model with independence between the participation and consumption decisions is the preferred specification for our data the most important variables influencing participation are region number of children education and ethnicity region age race ethnicity and health status most affected consumption levels

subsidies for intracity and intercity commuting this paper analyzes subsidies for intracity and intercity commuting in an urban economics framework with two cities and agglomeration externalities where workers may commute within and between cities first commuting subsidies serve to internalize agglomeration externalities intracity commuting subsidies give incentives to move to the larger city and intercity commuting subsidies make residents of the periphery commute to the core second if agglomeration rents are locally captured commuting subsidies act as a welfare enhancing transfer from the core to the periphery

the incidence of congestion tolls on urban highways abstract the incidence of an optimal short run congestion toll is investigated using an equilibrium model of modal choice and congestion on a highway corridor served by express bus transit it is argued that for an externality tax the usual equi revenue analysis of burdens is inappropriate instead welfare effects are computed under three alternative assumptions about redistribution of toll revenues in almost all cases the net result is benefits for all income groups it is concluded that congestion tolls should not be rejected on grounds of income distribution but that an explicit package of tolls and revenue uses is probably a political prerequisite for adoption