willingness to pay for land preservation across states and jurisdictional scale implications for benefit transfer in stated preference valuation of farmland preservation respondents are often told that preservation will occur within various jurisdictional scales that is community or state but are not told the specific location of parcels the resultant availability of welfare estimates for different scales and regions provides numerous avenues for benefit transfer this paper provides a systematic assessment of transfer error contrasting different methods for the transfer of farmland preservation values across states and jurisdictional scales results drawn from multistate choice experiments suggest that the choice of across scale versus across state transfer method can have significant implications for transfer validity

the use and abuse of meta analysis in environmental and natural resource economics an assessment motivated by the 2006 report of a work group appointed by the environmental protection agency epa this paper examines the present state of meta analysis in environmental economics and offers recommendations for its future use to this end we summarize and assess 140 meta analyses from 125 published and unpublished studies covering 17 topical categories in environmental and resource economics first we provide several generic meta analysis models as reference points and discuss major estimation issues five econometric issues are identified as part of a complete analysis 1 sample selection criteria 2 basic data summary 3 primary data heterogeneity 4 heteroskedasticity and 5 non independence of multiple observations from primary studies second a tabular summary is presented for the 140 meta analyses with respect to estimation methods third a narrative summary is presented for 19 meta analyses including the three value of statistical life studies examined by the epa work group and one analysis from each of 16 other categories fourth we offer a set of best practice guidelines for future meta analyses in this and other areas of economics last the paper comments on the use of meta analytic methods for benefit transfers of environmental values

efficiency and equity tradeoffs incentive compatible contracts revisited abstract while the efficiency of certain contractual choices has been well established less attention has been given to the distributional outcomes of contracting in natural resource based industries data from a case study of seed gatherers in honduras demonstrates that workers paid under a relative payment system receive an earnings premium of about 25 of which 40 cannot be explained by observed differences in worker productivity a theoretical agency model is outlined in the appendix to explain why workers under tournaments necessarily enjoy a higher return than those under piece rates implying a more skewed income distribution as suggested in the efficiency wage literature

the firm size farm size and transaction costs the case of hazelnut farms in turkey this study analyzes the effects of transaction costs on the size of hazelnut farms in turkey the study finds that higher land slope and higher variance of rain as transaction cost increasing natural effects lead to smaller hazelnut land holdings high slope and weather variation can increase the costs of monitoring the laborers make moving inputs or output up and down harder limit the use of machinery and reduce contractual performance of labor contracts for farm production functions land is a complex input with measurable interactions with nature contrary to common production theory approaches that take natural properties of land as given the study develops a production function that incorporates natural properties such as slope and rain variance the study utilizes two separate data sets for the estimations the first data set explores the characteristics of hazelnut farmers while the second one analyzes the regional characteristics of hazelnut farms

the aggregation of environmental benefit values welfare measures distance decay and total wtp abstract we review the literature regarding the aggregation of benefit value estimates for non market goods two case studies are presented through which we develop an approach to aggregation which applies the spatial analytic capabilities of a geographical information system to combine geo referenced physical census and survey data to estimate a spatially sensitive valuation function these case studies show that the common reliance upon political rather than economic jurisdictions and the use of sample mean values within the aggregation process are liable to lead to significant errors in resultant values we also highlight the fact that for resources with use values then we should expect overall values to reduce with increasing distance from such sites but that changes in the choice of welfare measure will determine whether such distance decay is to be expected within values stated by those who are presently non users the paper concludes by providing recommendations for future improvements to the methodology

choice of contracts in turkish agriculture sharecropping and fixed rent tenancy have coexisted under extremely diverse settings for centuries from labor abundant south and east asia to land abundant west africa and the americas this fact has intrigued generations of economists since adam smith marshall s lucid exposition of the productive inefficiencies of sharecropping in the principles paved the way for a major effort to reconcile neoclassical theory with the reality of coexistence 1 another substantial segment of the literature condemned sharecropping as an exploitative mechanism in semifeudal societies and predicted its downfall 2 more recent theoretical treatments however hail the share contract as a simple yet ingenious arrangement that guarantees the second best outcome in environments characterized by risk input market imperfections and moral hazard 3 the intuition underlying this argument is widely accepted but has yet to yield a general explanation of the real world coexistence phenomenon nor should we expect such an explanation each country and historical episode has its unique climatic technological and institutional characteristics and different motives for the adoption of share contracts may dominate in different settings 4 it is troublesome in fact that our empirical knowledge is so thin given that our theory of agricultural contracts is so rich 5 one reason of course is that appropriate data are costly and difficult to collectfor contractual choice is stubbornly complex and is best observed at the individual agent or household level there has been empirical work but much of it has examined the well worn marshallian theme is sharecropping less efficient than self cultivation 6 our knowledge of the conditions under which different contracts are likely to arise is limited to a handful of studies on the indian subcontinent or the united states in this article i examine the determinants of contractual choice during the 1970s for samples of individual turkish landlords and tenants the data were drawn from a 1973 survey that was national in

channels of interstate risk sharing united states 1963 1990 we develop a framework for quantifying the amount of risk sharing among states in the united states and construct data that allow us to decompose the cross sectional variance in gross state product into several components which we refer to as levels of smoothing we find that 39 percent of shocks to gross state product are smoothed by capital markets 13 percent are smoothed by the federal government and 23 percent are smoothed by credit markets the remaining 25 percent are not smoothed we also decompose the federal government smoothing into subcategories taxes transfers and grants to states

consumption insurance between japanese households this paper examines the implication of the full insurance hypothesis and differences in its applicability across groups of households in japan using a rare japanese individual panel data set called the japanese panel survey of consumption the paper first shows that the full insurance hypothesis is strongly rejected for the country as a whole the paper further shows that the rich as well as the poor and also college graduates as well as non college graduates cannot insure their consumption against income shocks in sharp contrast urban residents can pool income shocks completely whereas rural residents cannot rural residents suffer from income risks more seriously than urban residents in japan

reducing barriers in future benefit transfers needed improvements in primary study design and reporting abstract original research provides many social benefits including additions to our stock of knowledge benefit transfer is a formal process whereby our stock of knowledge rather than original research is used to inform decisions any shortcoming in this stock directly affects our ability to conduct valid and reliable benefit transfers this paper discusses three general criteria that are necessary for valid benefit transfers and how original research designs and reporting of results unnecessarily constrain the potential of benefit transfers we make several suggestions regarding how original research through improved design and reporting might increase the validity and reliability of benefit transfers we also recommend that repositories for original research surveys and data be developed to insure long term availability of study information

environmental and distributional impacts of conservation targeting strategies abstract resource purchasing funds have become a major tool for environmental protection and resource conservation these funds use various strategies to target resources for conservation the choice of which may lead to striking differences in environmental performance this paper develops an analytical framework to analyze the impact of alternative targeting strategies on different interest groups including consumers producers labor and environmentalists we show that ignoring the output price effect of purchasing funds reduces environmental gain and in some cases may make a purchasing fund counterproductive and we argue that the optimal design of targeting criteria must consider the price feedback effect

intranational business cycles in the united states abstract we established a comprehensive set of stylized facts for intranational business cycles across states and regions in the u s notable findings are that the cross correlations of our consumption measure is much less than that for output and the volatility of the real exchange rate between states is much less than that for output these findings are contrasted with the quantity and price anomalies found in international business cycle data additional results for labour and non labour earnings suggest that the observed amount of intratemporal risk sharing is quite limited as compared to that for intertemporal risk sharing

willingness to pay for agricultural land preservation and policy process attributes does the method matter this article examines relationships between willingness to pay for land preservation and policy process attributes the approach departs from traditional welfare assessments in that it does not constrain attributes of the policy process to be utility neutral results indicate policy process attributes may influence utility in some circumstances even after controlling for the influence of land use outcomes often correlated with specific policy techniques results further imply that in some cases even comprehensive specification of land use outcomes by stated preference instruments may be insufficient to prevent systematic shifts in willingness to pay related to unspecified yet assumed policy process attributes

international risk sharing and european monetary unification abstract we explore income and consumption smoothing patterns among european community ec countries and among oecd countries during the period 1966 90 we find that for oecd as well as for ec countries about 40 percent of shocks to gdp are smoothed at the one year frequency with about half the smoothing achieved through national government budget deficits and half by corporate saving at the three year differencing frequency only 25 percent of shocks to gdp are smoothed mainly via government lending and borrowing in the absence of alternative income and consumption smoothing mechanisms the restrictions on budget deficits imposed by the maastricht treaty should be relaxed to allow governments to run large temporary deficits in response to output shocks

prioritizing payment for environmental services using nonmarket benefits and costs for optimal selection abstract this article provides a practical applied analysis of optimal targeting in agricultural land preservation comparing the performance of four alternative targeting strategies nonmarket benefit data and hedonic cost estimates are used for parcels in sussex county delaware the results show that branch and bound optimization opt does not significantly outperform the much simpler benefit cost ratio targeting bcrt however significant losses of potential net benefits occur when applied methods overlook either benefits or costs in this application benefit targeting bt and cost targeting ct significantly underperform both opt and bcrt with bt underperforming all other methods

targeting conservation efforts in the presence of threshold effects and ecosystem linkages abstract the prevailing federal policy of targeting conservation programs on the basis of physical criteria tends to ignore the threshold effect of conservation efforts and the correlation between alternative environmental benefits in this article we examine the extent to which conservation funds will be misallocated when threshold effects and correlated benefits are ignored we show that targeting conservation efforts based on physical criteria or political equity concerns may actually lead to the lowest possible benefits to society from conservation expenditure ignoring correlated benefits may lead not only to misallocation of conservation funds among watersheds but also to incorrect resources e g land streams being targeted for conservation the empirical analysis focuses on riparian habitat investments for salmon restoration in the pacific northwest we show that a large portion of conservation benefits would be lost when threshold effects and correlated benefits are ignored and argue that funds should be allocated so that the total value of environmental benefits is maximized not the total amount of resources protected

habitat and open space at risk of land use conversion targeting strategies for land conservation funds available to purchase land and easements for conservation purposes are limited this article provides a targeting strategy for protecting multiple environmental benefits that includes heterogeneity in land costs and probability of land use conversion by incorporating spatially explicit land use change and hedonic price models this strategy is compared to two alternative strategies that omit either land cost or conversion threat based on dynamic programming and monte carlo simulations with alternating periods of conservation and development we demonstrate that the positive correlation between land costs and probability of land use conversion affects targeting efficiency using parcel data from sonoma county california

risk sharing within the united states what do financial markets and fiscal federalism accomplish we measure income uncertainty at the level of u s states and the extent to which it has been reduced through risksharing using a method recently developed by athanasoulis and van wincoop 2000 risk is measured as the standard deviation of state specific income growth uncertainty measured by using the error term of a regression of income growth on variables in the information set risk sharing is measured by the extent to which this standard deviation has been reduced through financial markets and federal fiscal policy the advantage of this measure over the existing risk sharing literature is that the interpretation does not depend on many auxiliary assumptions our findings on the extent of risk sharing are insensitive to the only assumption we need to make the variables that are in the information set we find that the standard deviation of state specific income growth uncertainty is reduced by less than half through financial markets and federal fiscal policy we show that the extent of risk sha

informing preservation of multifunctional agriculture when primary research is unavailable an application of meta analysis motivations for agricultural policy are increas ingly driven by nonproduction or multifunc tional services as early as 1977 gardner argued that the most compelling case for agricultural preservation is the provision of public good amenities economists have since devoted considerable effort to research that es timates market and nonmarket values of mul tifunctional outputs bergstrom and ready 2009 given recent progress in this area however it is surprising how little impact related research has made on the policy pro cess consider selection approaches used in common purchase of agricultural conservation easement pace programs such approaches e g land evaluation and site assessment use criteria that focus largely on parcel at tributes associated with profitable production where no market failure exists e g soil qual ity see nickerson and hellerstein 2003 with less weight given to multifunctional amenities or public preferences among the reasons for limited use of pub lic preference information to guide policy is the paucity of transferable tools to predict the influence of multifunctional services on pub lic welfare evidence from the valuation liter

addressing negative willingness to pay in dichotomous choice contingent valuation this paper has four purposes first we outline the controversy surroundingthe issue of negative willingness to pay wtp in contingent valuation cv studies second we use monte carlo simulation to examine theperformance of alternative distributionalassumptions in estimating wtp in the presenceof varying proportions of the populationholding negative wtp values we focus ondichotomous choice cv dc cv where negativewtp values may be especially difficult todetect third we extend the simulation toinvestigate the performance of the mixturemodels that have recently been proposed forhandling identifying non positive wtp values fourth we extend the simulation to investigatethe performance of the nonparametric lowerbound turnbull approach results indicate thatthe relative performance of the dc cv modelingalternatives evaluated here which assumepositive wtp varies across the simulationsetting e g proportion of negative wtp butnone can be said to reasonably solve theproblem ex post this underscores theimportance of ex ante efforts to identify ifnegative wtp is likely to be prominent in agiven valuation setting in such cases appropriately handling negative wtp must beaddressed through ex ante survey design andmodeling choices that allow negative wtp

the intertemporal elasticity of substitution an exploration using a us panel of state data this paper uses state level consumption data to estimate the intertemporal elasticity of substitution of consumption ies in contrast to the results of hall 1988 and campbell and mankiw 1989 we provide evidence indicating that the ies is significantly different from zero and probably close to one since inference about the ies in the context of the standard euler equation is problematic as a result of mis specification bias we cast most of our discussion in the context of the framework developed by campbell and mankiw this modifies the euler equation in that a fraction of agents simply consume their income the use of panel data to examine the relationship between interest rates and consumption growth has two advantages first we achieve a significant increase in precision which in particular allows us to rule out a zero ies second we can use the panel aspect of the data to bypass asset return measurement problems in particular we identify a common time component in expected consumption growth that is associated with movements in interest rates when the ies is positive

uncertainty entrepreneurship and sharecropping in india this study attempts to explain the coexistence of different farm lease arrangements in terms of the varying significance of entrepreneurial functions in india crop sharing arrangements are common in areas of relative economic certainty with very little scope for decision making for example for product and factor substitution and where the entrepreneurial profit is low fixed cash rents are common in situations of high uncertainty where the scope for decision making is significant or where the crops are highly profitable efficiency considerations predominate in areas of sharecropping favoring a smaller farm size whereas under high uncertainty large size is favored for reducing risk

public employment and regional risk sharing we provide an empirical analysis of regional risk sharing in norway over the period 1977 90 the approach of asdrubali sorensen and yosha 1996 is extended to take public employment into account as a possible shock absorber the other channels of risk sharing are capital markets and commuting taxes and transfers and credit markets the estimated degree of regional consumption insurance is very high we cannot reject the hypothesis that there is full interregional risk sharing in the short term public employment absorbs up to 25 percent of private sector output shocks in our analyses generally central government insurance against regional shocks is relatively more important the more permanent the shocks are and vice versa for market based risk sharing channels