users and non users of conservation areas are there differences in wtp motives and the validity of responses in cvm surveys abstract it is commonly assumed that respondents lack of familiarity with the valued resource causes invalid and unreliable responses in contingent valuation surveys with non users valuations mainly motivated by non use values the issue is also closely linked to the discussion of the measurement of non use values this paper re examines the impact of previous use on respondents willingness to support nature conservation their motives for valuing the resource and the validity of responses the users and non users characteristics differed but there was no difference between the groups in their willingness to support sustained conservation however those planning to visit the area in the near future were more likely to pay for conservation than other respondents even if they did not have previous use experience users considered their income constraint somewhat more carefully and were more aware of conservation related issues than non users however there was no difference in the validity of the wtp responses of the groups thus there seems to be no rationale from a point of view of validity to restrict cvm analysis only to those individuals who have previous experience of the resource which is in line with the basic premise of cvm furthermore non use values remained as significant motives for valuing the resource even if the use of the resource was intensive therefore if the existence of a large non use value component is considered as problematic in general the problem is likely to exist for all respondent groups and not only for non users

agricultural price instability a survey of competing explanations and remedies there are two explanations for agricultural price dynamics one follows cobweb logic and models fluctuations driven by expectation errors but emphasises that these expectations create complex dynamics and possibly chaos the other stems from the rational expectations tradition of dynamics driven by real shocks the empirical evidence tends to support the latter but is not conclusive the rational expectations model generates an optimal dynamic path from which no improvement can be expected from public intervention however if we take account of all the potential market failures in agricultural markets and especially in developing countries this conclusion might require some qualifications although an appropriate policy design for stability has still to be achieved this paper surveys the positive and normative literature on agricultural prices highlighting empirical evidence and identifying remaining unresolved issues

oppositional identities and employment for ethnic minorities evidence from england where a community or group is socially excluded from a dominant group some individuals of that group may identify with the dominant culture and others may reject that culture the aim of this article is to investigate this issue by empirically analysing the potential trade off for ethnic minorities between sticking to their own roots and labour market success we find that the social environment of individuals and attachments to culture of origin has a strong association with identity choice our results also suggest that those non whites who have preferences that accord with being oppositional do experience an employment penalty

an economic analysis of acting white this paper formalizes a widely discussed peer eect entitled acting white acting white is modeled as a two audience signaling quandary signals that induce high wages can be signals that induce peer group rejection without peer eects equilibria involve all ability types choosing dierent levels of education acting white alters the equilibrium dramatically the possibly empty set of lowest ability individuals and the set of highest ability individuals continue to reveal their type through investments in education ability types in the middle interval pool on a common education level only those in the lower intervals are accepted by the group the model s predictions t many stylized facts in the anthropology and sociology literatures regarding social interactions among minority group members

protest responses and willingness to pay attitude toward paying for stormwater pollution abatement abstract in contingent valuation cv surveys there is often a proportion of individuals who are not willing to pay to obtain avoid an increase decrease in some attribute of a particular environmental public good some of these respondents might protest an aspect of the cv survey e g payment vehicle or the behavioral intention i e willingness to pay wtp constituting the measure of economic value respondents attitudes toward the behavior of paying for a particular public good may contribute to the decision to pay independent of other explanatory variables such as the price of the intervention household income and methodological characteristics of the cv survey moreover attitude toward paying for the good may manifest in protest responses as a reaction to higher prices and methodological factors e g the payment vehicle to the extent that protest beliefs are dependent on such matters of survey design they may be alleviated through changes in cv methodology however to the extent that protest beliefs are a reaction to the act of paying methodological remedies may not be effective cv surveys of stormwater pollution abatement were conducted in four australian state capital cities the surveys differed with respect to the type of pollution abatement intervention the payment regime the vector of prices used in the dichotomous choice question and the institution responsible for implementing the stormwater pollution intervention protest beliefs were measured for all respondents irrespective of their responses to the wtp question results indicated that attitude toward paying underpinned protest beliefs regarding the role of government in stormwater management and individual rights to unpolluted waterways this attitude was present in each city sample despite methodological differences between the cv surveys attitude toward paying explained variability in wtp and was a larger predictor than was price household income was significantly associated with attitude toward paying and this relationship was also invariant over city samples protest beliefs were not independent of either the wtp question or demographic factors such as household income rather these beliefs were related to wtp through attitudes toward the act of paying for stormwater pollution abatement censoring protest responses in the present study would bias cv samples toward those individuals who are favorably disposed toward paying for environmental public goods and those from higher income households

peer pressure and partnerships partnerships and profit sharing are often claimed to motivate workers by giving them a share of the pie but in organizations of any significant size the free rider effects would seem to choke off

assessing the validity and reliability of contingent values a comparison of on site users off site users and non users abstract imperfect information in contingent markets can affect the validity and reliability of contingent values willingness to pay wtp for changes in natural resource allocations survey respondents can acquire information about the natural resource to be valued from behavior such as on site use of the resource off site use of the resource and or from the survey itself in this paper we compare the validity and reliability of wtp from respondents who obtained information in these different ways using theoretical validity tests based on relative prices as well as income we find that wtp is valid for respondents with information from on site and or off site use willingness to pay is less valid for respondents who had no information about the natural resource before they participated in the survey using an alternative form reliability test we find that wtp is in the technical sense reliable for all respondents and somewhat more reliable for on site users

political economy of public policies insights from distortions to agricultural and food markets the agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational while others have been gradual but persistent this paper reviews and synthesizes the literature on trends and fluctuations in market distortions and the political economy explanations that have been advanced based on a rich global data set covering a half century of evidence on commodities countries and policy instruments the paper identifies hypotheses that have been explored in the literature on the extent of market distortions and the conditions under which reform may be feasible

public goods in networks this paper considers incentives to provide goods that are non excludable along social or geographic links we find first that networks can lead to specialization in public good provision in every social network there is an equilibrium where some individuals contribute and others free ride in many networks this extreme is the only outcome second specialization can benefit society as a whole this outcome arises when contributors are linked collectively to many agents finally a new link increases access to public goods but reduces individual incentives to contribute hence overall welfare can be higher when there are holes in a network

assimilation patterns in cities abstract do ethnic minority individuals assimilate to the majority s norm or reject it by trading off higher productivity and wages with a greater social distance to their culture of origin we develop a model in which oppositional ethnic minority individuals reside in more segregated areas have worse outcomes in terms of income but are not necessarily worse off in terms of welfare than assimilated ethnic minority individuals who live in less segregated areas a policy that reduces transportation cost decreases rather than increases assimilation in cities when there are more productivity spillovers between the two groups ethnic minority individuals are more likely not to assimilate and to reject the majority s norm finally we show that ethnic minority individuals tend to assimilate more in bigger and more expensive cities

characterizing the effects of valuation methodology in function based benefits transfer abstract meta analyses have demonstrated that willingness to pay wtp estimates vary systematically according to methodological factors the benefits transfer literature provides little guidance with regard to the treatment of such effects transfers are typically conducted by ignoring such effects using ad hoc adjustments or otherwise suppressing information regarding the sensitivity of wtp to methodological attributes this paper illustrates a means to characterize methodological effects within benefits transfer based on an application of the common bootstrap drawing from meta analysis the approach characterizes the sampling distribution of wtp with respect to patterns of methodological variation present in underlying studies results provide a means to characterize the extent of variation associated with predefined groups of methodological attributes providing transparent information on the sensitivity of wtp not typically available in benefits transfer

sect subsidy and sacrifice an economist s view of ultra orthodox jews israeli ultra orthodox men study full time in yeshiva until age 40 on average why do fathers with families in poverty choose yeshiva over work draft deferments subsidize yeshiva attendance yet attendance typically continues long after exemption fertility rates are high tfr 7 6 and rising a social interaction approach explains these anomalies yeshiva attendance signals commitment to the community which provides mutual insurance to members prohibitions strengthen communities by effectively taxing real wages inducing high fertility historically the incursion of markets into traditional communities produces ultra orthodoxy subsidies induce dramatic reductions in labor supply and unparalleled increases in fertility illustrating extreme responses social groups may have to interventions

environmental damage evaluation in a willingness to accept scenario a latent class approach based on familiarity in this paper we report on the results of the application of a latent class model that was designed to identify and characterize unobserved preference heterogeneity in the context of a willingness to accept wta framework involving negative environmental externalities stemming from the expansion of the port of valencia we investigated the hypothesis that respondents with greater familiarity with the targeted good and any related environmental damage would demand more compensation that is they would have a significantly higher wta based on respondents familiarity with the port of valencia and their pre existing knowledge about the negative consequences of its potential expansion three clusters based on six indicators are identified results show that contrary to what might be expected familiarity with a public good does not in all cases have a significant effect on stated wta

segregation in friendship networks we analyze a network formation model where agents belong to different communities both individual benefits and costs depend on direct as well as indirect connections benefits of an indirect connection decrease with distance in the network while the cost of a link depends on the type of agents involved two agents from the same community always face a low linking cost while the cost of forming a relationship between two agents from different communities diminishes with the rate of exposure of each of them to the other community we find that socialization among the same type of agent can be weak even if the cost of maintaining links within one s own type is very low our model also suggests that policies aimed at reducing segregation are socially desirable only if they reduce the within community cost differential by a sufficiently large amount

peer effects and social networks in education this paper studies whether structural properties of friendship networks affect individual outcomes in education we first develop a model that shows that at the nash equilibrium the outcome of each individual embedded in a network is proportional to her katz bonacich centrality measure this measure takes into account both direct and indirect friends of each individual but puts less weight to her distant friends we then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed dataset of adolescent friendship networks we show that after controlling for observable individual characteristics and unobservable network specific factors the individual s position in a network as measured by her katz bonacich centrality is a key determinant of her level of activity a standard deviation increase in the katz bonacich centrality increases the pupil school performance by more than 7 percent of one standard deviation

credibly identifying social effects accounting for network formation and measurement error understanding whether and how connections between agents networks such as declared friendships in classrooms transactions between firms and extended family connections influence their socio economic outcomes has been a growing area of research within economics early methods developed to identify these social effects assumed that networks had formed exogenously and were perfectly observed both of which are unlikely to hold in practice a more recent literature both within economics and in other disciplines develops methods that relax these assumptions this paper reviews that literature it starts by providing a general econometric framework for linear models of social effects and illustrates how network endogeneity and missing data on the network complicate identification of social effects thereafter it discusses methods for overcoming the problems caused by endogenous formation of networks finally it outlines the stark consequences of missing data on measures of the network and regression parameters before describing potential solutions

endogenous peer effects local aggregate or local average a b s t r a c t we develop a unified model embedding different behavioral mechanisms of social interac tions and design a statistical model selection test to differentiate between them in empirical applications this framework is applied to study peer effects in education effort in study ing and sport activities for adolescents in the united states we find that for education students tend to conform to the social norm of their friends while for sport activities both the social multiplier and the social norm effect matter

relative pay and its effects on firm efficiency in a transitional economy abstract in this study we examine the impact of relative pay manager pay divided by average worker pay on a firm s productivity using data from a major transitional economy china we find that relative pay is negatively associated with high productivity our results provide support for the view that workers are alienated when their incomes are far lower than that of top management and this leads to lower productivity this effect is most pronounced in labor intensive firms

job information networks neighborhood effects and inequality this paper explores the theoretical and empirical literature to examine the use by different social groups of informal sources of information provided by friends relatives and acquaintances during job search and its consequences for the job market it also addresses the role of network structure and size the resource endowments of contacts and nature of the links between contacts to explain differences in the effects of job information networks in doing so the paper also turns to the sociology literature on job information networks and provides an economic perspective on such sociological concepts as strong versus weak ties inbreeding distance from structural holes etc the paper distinguishes between models of exogenous job information networks that is where individuals obtain job related information through a given social structure and endogenous job information networks which are social networks that result from individuals uncoordinated actions the paper pays special attention to such issues as physical and social proximity and sharing of information and discusses them in the context of the recent social interactions and neighborhood effects literature finally the paper outlines a model that integrates job information networks where interactions occur in business cycle frequencies with the dynamics of human capital formation which include the joint effects of parental community and neighborhood human capital and are set in life cycle frequencies for the purpose of organizing suggestions for future research and examining earned income inequality

enhanced geospatial validity for meta analysis and environmental benefit transfer an application to water quality improvements meta regression models are commonly used within benefit transfer to estimate willingness to pay wtp for environmental quality improvements theory suggests that these estimates should be sensitive to geospatial factors including resource scale market extent and the availability of substitutes and complements valuation meta regression models addressing the quantity of non market commodities sometimes incorporate spatial variables that proxy for a subset of these effects however meta analyses of wtp for environmental quality generally omit geospatial factors such as these leading to benefit transfers that are invariant to these factors this paper reports on a meta regression model for water quality benefit transfer that incorporates spatially explicit factors predicted by theory to influence wtp the metadata are drawn from stated preference studies that estimate per household wtp for water quality changes in united states water bodies and combine primary study information with extensive geospatial data from external sources results find that geospatial variables are associated with significant wtp variations as predicted by theory and that inclusion of these variables reduces transfer errors

social rewards externalities and stable preferences this paper examines the role of social rewards as a corrective mechanism for activities which generate externalities the focus of this paper is on the circumstances under which social rewards provide effective and feasible incentive mechanism that may replace laws and regulations in particular social mechanism is effective only in a society in which individuals who care about their standing in the society can survive in the long run we show that the nature of economic interaction between matched players influences whether the socially minded individuals survive in the long run and restricts the effectiveness of social rewards however circumstances exist where the socially minded survive even though relative fitness is determined only by economic payoff 1998 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

modern input promotion in sub saharan africa insights from asian green revolution using case materials from four major cereal growing countries in asia bangladesh india indonesia and pakistan the article analyzes key aspects of agricultural input policies in asia results suggest that asian policies differ from the current wave of african input subsidy programs in three important ways i instead of focusing mostly on seed and chemical fertilizer input promotion in asia involved a package approach involving investments in agricultural rd ii farmers in three of four countries paid higher prices net taxed for fertilizer during the height of the green revolution suggesting that it was the profitability not the subsidy that was central to increasing fertilizer use and iii asian countries did not target input subsidies but given leakage and diversion estimates of targeted programs it is unclear whether targeting would have been more cost effective both continents have two challenges in common degradation of soil health and increasingly larger shares of public spending on input subsidies the first challenge calls for paying attentions to improving fertilizer use efficiency which is an achievable target with high pay off in the long run the other challenge is now a historical fact that is once introduced subsidies are hard to eliminate even if they no longer contribute to agricultural productivity growth

social norms in networks abstract although the linear in means model is the workhorse model in empirical work on peer effects its theoretical properties are understudied in this study we develop a social norm model that provides a microfoundation of the linear in means model and investigate its properties we show that individual outcomes may increase decrease or vary non monotonically with the taste for conformity equilibria are usually inefficient and to restore the first best the planner needs to subsidize tax agents whose neighbors make efforts above below the social norms thus giving more subsidies to more central agents is not necessarily efficient we also discuss the policy implications of our model in terms of education and crime

the effects of experience on preferences theory and empirics for environmental public goods this article develops a choice model for environmental public goods which allows for consumers to learn about their preferences through consumption experiences we develop a theoretical model of bayesian updating perform comparative statics over the model and show how the theoretical model can be consistently incorporated into a reduced form econometric model our main findings are that in a random utility model rum discrete choice model a subject s scale should increase and the variability of scale should decrease with experience if subjects are bayesians we then estimate the model using field data regarding preferences for one particular public good water quality we find strong evidence that additional experience increases scale thereby making consumer preferences more predictable from the econometrician s perspective we find supportive but less convincing evidence that experience decreases the variability of scale across subjects

india s grain security policy in the era of high food prices a computable general equilibrium analysis this study uses a computable general equilibrium model to evaluate the fiscal and welfare costs of the market stabilisation and insulating food policy of india during the 2007 08 global food crisis we demonstrate that domestic food grain price stabilisation through simultaneously subsidising consumers and producers and restricting exports entailed huge fiscal costs and equally large welfare costs to india an outcome that is almost always the worst as compared to the alternative policy mixes examined in this study while the most market oriented domestic and trade policy alternatives that would generate better welfare effects and the least fiscal costs may not be feasible due to political economy considerations we argue that there exist some middle ground policy mixes featuring partial relaxations of domestic subsidies on either food grains or fertilisers and or less restrictive border policies which are superior in terms of their welfare effects and fiscal costs and might also be politically feasible these findings have important implications on the ongoing debates on india s food security policy particularly in relation to the discussion on its national food security act

introduction to the economics of religion after a very long hiatus economists have begun again to study the relationship between economics and religion this article seeks to summarize and evaluate the principal themes and empirical findings that have appeared in some 200 recent papers on the economics of religion although some of the research concerns the economic consequences of religiosity most applies standard economic theory to the study of individual religious activity the characteristics of religious groups and the impact of regulation and competition on religious markets

formation and persistence of oppositional identities we develop a dynamic model of identity formation that explains why ethnic minorities may choose to adopt oppositional identities i e some individuals may reject or not the dominant culture and why this behavior may persist over time we first show that the prevalence of an oppositional culture in the minority group cannot always be sustained in equilibrium indeed because the size of the majority group is larger there is an imposed process of exposition to role models from the majority group that favors the diffusion of mainstream values in the minority community in spite of this an oppositional culture in the minority group can nevertheless be sustained in steady state if there is enough cultural segmentation in terms of role models or if the size of the minority group is large enough or if the degree of oppositional identity it implies is high enough we also demonstrate that the higher the level of harassment and the number of racist individuals in the society the more likely an oppositional minority culture will emerge we finally show that ethnic identity and socialization effort can be more intense in mixed rather than segregated neighborhoods 2011 elsevier b v all rights reserved

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

respondent direct experience and contingent willingness to pay for new commodities a switching endogenous interval regression analysis most environmental economists argue that direct experience with the good being valuated or with similar goods is a precondition for providing valid willingness to pay wtp responses to contingent valuation questions two questions are posed in this article the first is whether previous use experience of a resource sene nature reserve similar to that being valuated future nature reserves and located in the same geographical area gulf of morbihan impacts on wtp the second is whether accounting for the endogeneity of direct experience matters in the estimation of wtp we find that respondents who have not experienced the sene nature reserve provide value estimates that are statistically comparable to that of respondents who have experienced it our assumption is that respondents have acquired sufficient and adequate experience of future nature reserves from the questionnaire that experience obtained by experiencing the sene nature reserve was not necessary for making a valid value formulation hen

export restrictions and price insulation during commodity price booms for individual countries variable trade barriers can be used to reduce the volatility of domestic relative to world prices if this is done by countries accounting for a large share of the market its effect is offset by increases in world price volatility this study shows the nature of the resulting collective action problem with the policy being ineffective on average in stabilizing domestic prices while increasing the volatility of the income transfers from terms of trade changes a simple approach to assessing the contribution of insulation to the price increases is developed and used with new estimates of agricultural distortions to assess its contribution to the price spikes in 1972 74 and 2006 08 for rice and wheat the analysis suggests that 45 percent of the increase in rice prices in 2006 08 and 30 percent of the increase in wheat prices was due to insulating behavior one sign of progress since 1972 74 was a substantial reduction in the extent of price insulating behavior by the industrial countries this provides little stabilizing benefit in the rice market because countries not classifying themselves at the world trade organization as developing account for only 3 percent of world rice consumption but it does offer some benefit for the wheat market where non developing countries account for 27 percent of consumption

an empirical analysis of acting white abstract using a newly available data set which allows one to construct a novel measure of a student s social status we demonstrate that there are potentially important racial differences in the relationship between social status and academic achievement the effect is concentrated among students with a grade point average gpa of 3 5 or higher and more pronounced in schools with more interracial contact earlier studies showing a positive relationship between popularity and academic achievement for blacks are sensitive to the inclusion of more continuous achievement measures we argue that the data are most consistent with a model of acting white in which investments in education are taken as a signal of one s opportunity costs of peer group loyalty though imprecise estimates make definitive conclusions difficult

construct validity of dichotomous and polychotomous choice contingent valuation questions in this note we conduct construct validity tests for dichotomous choice dc and polychotomous choice pc contingent valuation questions contrary to previous results we find that dc and pc estimates of willingness to pay are theoretically valid convergent valid and similar in terms of statistical precision similar to previous results pc respondents are less sensitive to information than dc respondents we conclude that dc and pc valuation questions are construct valid for this study sequential pc valuation questions could be used in studies where obtaining information about the certainty or intensity of respondent preferences would be useful

eliciting public preference for nuclear energy against the backdrop of global warming one of the most important issues related to sustainability is to reduce the use of fossil fuels due to the reduction in greenhouse gases ghg emission nuclear power results in low carbon emissions and is thus important to mitigating the adverse effects of global warming and climate change however the downside of nuclear power cannot be overlooked and consequently nuclear power is a controversial issue in many countries around the world thus an important question concerns how people should support nuclear power do the climate and energy security benefits of nuclear power outweigh its risks and costs therefore we use a modified double bounded contingent valuation model to explore the attitudes and the willingness to pay wtp of a country in order to demonstrate its implications for policy we confirm that supporters and opponents of nuclear power are balanced both in terms of their numbers and in terms of their wtp the policy implication is that people do not support any dramatic increase or reduction in nuclear power and that nuclear power should still be an important means of generating electricity in taiwan the current share of nuclear power in electricity generation of 20 should be maintained in the near future

respondent experience and contingent valuation of environmental goods abstract respondent experience i e a respondent s information set has long been suspected to influence contingent valuation estimates of environmental values we assess the influence of experience by explicitly modeling the relationship between respondent experience and both fitted individual resource values and the conditional variance of these estimated values using three different joint specifications for experience and wtp normal censored normal poisson censored normal and zero inflated poisson censored normal we find discrete jumps in resource values as experience increases from zero and that more experienced respondents have smaller conditional variances simulation of arbitrary levels of experience allows standardization of the amount of information when developing welfare estimates

the indian public distribution system as provider of food security evidence from child nutrition in andhra pradesh abstract we study whether a sudden increase of the price of rice supplied by the indian public distribution system in andhra pradesh a large indian state had a negative impact on child nutrition a few months after the price increase a health survey started to record weight for a large sample of children the data collection continued for several months so that children measured later lived for a longer period of time in a less favorable price regime using different estimation techniques we find that longer exposure to high prices are not accompanied by worse nutritional status as measured by weight for age

conformism and self selection in social networks i present a model of conformism in social networks that incorporates both peer effects and self selection i show that conformism has positive social value and that social welfare can be bounded by network polarization and connectivity measures i apply the model to empirical data on high school students participation in extracurricular activities i find that the local effect of conformism i e the endogenous peer effect for a fixed network structure ranges from 7 5 to 45 depending on the number of peers that an individual has simulations show that the optimal policies of an inequality averse policymaker change depending on a school s enrollment small schools should encourage shy students to interact more with other students while large schools should focus on promoting role models within the school

costing an international public good the case of the baltic sea abstract the paper discusses an economically efficient and internationally equitable provision of a specific public good the good in question the baltic sea satisfies a number of needs but economic values implied may be different in various countries polluting and using the sea the level of eutrophication has been identified as a key characteristic of the baltic sea relevant for its value the chander tulkens model of cost sharing is used to determine a hypothetical allocation of abatement costs across the countries around the sea the application of the model is based on estimates of national abatement costs as well as national willingness to pay for reduced eutrophication estimating willingness to pay in a collection of countries some of which undergo a transition from centrally planned systems has been the main challenge of this study the results were derived from a coordinated series of contingent valuation surveys in lithuania poland and sweden combined with benefit transfer studies to cover the rest of the region predictions of cost sharing schemes obtained from the chander tulkens model are confronted with actual data on abatement expenditures and international assistance several recommendations on how to optimize the baltic wide programmes conclude the paper