models for referendum data the structure of discrete choice models for contingent valuation abstract in 1979 bishop and heberlein introduced an appealing variant of the contingent valuation method which required only yes or no responses hanemann developed a utility theoretic interpretation of the yes no responses which has helped popularize the approach recently cameron has offered another interpretation also utility theoretic which she argues is more general than the hanemann random utility model this paper compares the deterministic models suggested by hanemann and cameron showing them to be dual to each other it shows that correct specification of either function must exclude endogenous variables such as quantity demanded it also demonstrates that using utility theoretic models allows one to compare travel cost models and contigent valuation models on the basis of their implied behavior not on the unobservable surplus or variation measure

statistical efficiency of double bounded dichotomous choice contingent valuation the statistical efficiency of conventional dichotomous choice contingent valuation surveys can be improved by asking each respondent a second dichotomous choice question which depends on the response to the first question if the first response is yes the second bid is some amount greater than the first bid while if the first response is no the second bid is some amount smaller this double bounded approach is shown to be asymptotically more efficient than the conventional singlebounded approach using data from a survey of californians regarding their willingness to pay for wetlands in the san joaquin valley we show that in a finite sample the gain in efficiency can be very substantial

testing for non response and sample selection bias in contingent valuation analysis of a combination phone mail survey we use a combination phone mail survey to test for possible sample biases in contingent valuation we find no sample selection bias but do find non response bias we show how failure to correct for non response bias distorts aggregate benefit estimates

valuing option existence and bequest demands for wilderness to assess the relative importance of current costs and future benefits of nuclear waste storage we develop a simple model of bequest value the basic model of nonparternalistic altruism is extended to account for the uncertain nature of the externality

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

estimation using contingent valuation data from a dichotomous choice with follow up questionnaire reply abstract our original article proposed that the two yes no willingness to pay wtp responses produced by this survey format should be viewed as a pair of jointly distributed correlated discrete random variables the comparison model the conventional approach to estimation using these types of data contained a programming error correction alters the results from the comparison model but our original claim that estimation by conventional methods can produce misleading inferences if ours is the appropriate specification still stands this is especially true if negative wtp is precluded when e wtp is calculated

energy consumption economic growth nexus for pakistan taming the untamed abstract a recent survey of energy growth literature has highlighted the potential trade off between bivariate models that suffer from omitted variable bias and the danger of over parameterization of multivariate models in the individual country setting narayan and smyth 2 this is a serious limitation when the interest is in drawing policy implications for specific countries with short times series of available data the maximum entropy bootstrap approach was used to re examine the nature of causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth for pakistan where the available time series data was only from 1971 to 2011 unlike the techniques used in much of the earlier literature this approach does not rely on asymptotic methods and therefore leads to robust inference even in small samples moreover the approach can be applied in the presence of non stationarity of any type and structural breaks without requiring data transformation for to achieving stationarity and is not sensitive to specification errors such as those in lag length selection the empirical findings based on both the bivariate as well as the multivariate frameworks supported the conservation hypothesis implying the existence of a unidirectional causality from economic growth to energy consumption

foreign direct investment heterogeneous workers and employment security evidence from germany we analyze how foreign direct investment fdi affects employment security using administrative microdata for german employees measuring fdi intensity at the industry level enables us to take into account the sum of direct effects at multinationals as well as indirect effects of fdi throughout the affected industry we find that both inward and outward fdi significantly reduce employment security this is particularly the case for inward fdi coming from the western part of the european union as well as for outward fdi going to central and eastern europe the effects are sizeable for older and low skilled workers

dealing with uncertainty in public preferences for rural development policies a contingent valuation survey dominguez torreiro m and solino m dealing with uncertainty in public preferences for rural development policies a contingent valuation survey regional studies rural development programmes are currently envisaged as a means to foster the provision of a broad range of non commodity outputs emanating from multifunctional rural environments this paper presents a contingent valuation survey that analyses individuals perceptions of and willingness to pay for the implementation of a rural development programme in cantabria spain uncertainty in individuals preferences is explicitly acknowledged and introduced into the analytical framework for that purpose a comparison is made between the open ended and the multiple bounded uncertainty elicitation formats the expectation of a positive welfare change constitutes a sound argument in favour of regional rural development policies

revealing the nexus among energy economy system with haken model evidence from china s beijing tianjin hebei region abstract economic growth eg and energy consumption ec are interacting processes critical to regional sustainability the evolution mechanism and the nexus between them in the development process of jing jin ji region which is one of the most important agglomerations in china remain unrevealed systematically first the trends in decoupling state between eg and ec during 2001 2016 are checked with the impact gross domestic product technology igt model then eg and ec are defined as two sub systems to form a whole system with eg as the fast variable and ec as the slow one the evolutional interactions among the two subsystems and the whole system are elaborated through the haken model based on the synergetic theory by identifying changes in the decoupling index dr and the control variables a b 1 and 2 simulated by the haken model it can be demonstrated that the development of beijing reached a relatively good state with synergetic coordination of eg and ec the effect of eg on ec and ec on eg reversed in tianjin from positive to negative and hebei from negative to positive respectively ec kept prompting eg in tianjin and eg kept inhibiting ec in hebei both regions have not achieved a complete synergy of eg and ec calling for further ameliorations in economic development and energy consumption patterns in a transitional period this study is a first attempt to apply haken model in the field of energy and economy from the perspective of synergetics the exploration of the evolutional nexus between eg and ec in the jing jin ji region is expected to provide important references for policy formulation both locally and for other regions

interval estimates of non market resource values from referendum contingent valuation surveys contingent valuation methods cvm have attracted considerable attention in recent years as researchers have begun to resort to survey methods to elicit individual values for non market goods such as environmental resources or public goods cummings brookshire and schulze 1986 and mitchell and carson 1989 offer comprehensive assessments of these methods cvm survey questions come in a variety of forms one format which has proven to be popular is called the discrete choice or take it or leave it referendum or closedended question originally implemented in the literature by bishop and heberlein 1979 since respondents find it very difficult to identify precisely their true point value of access to some resource or public good open ended valuation questions can be unreliable or can discourage response in contrast most people are familiar with being confronted by a posted price for a good and with deciding whether or not they would buy at that price this is the strategy behind discrete choice cvm questions a different hypothetical price is offered to each respondent and by their yes no response to the question of whether they would be willing to pay this price the researcher gains information about their true underlying point value one persistent difficulty with the econometric techniques that are currently used most widely to analyze referendum contingent valuation data is the absence of confidence intervals for the ultimate value estimates early empirical applications approximate mean valuations using a truncated mean based on a logit model with the upper limit being the highest bid value in the sample unfortunately the variance of this estimated mean cannot easily be recovered from the numerical integration procedure commonly used to calculate the

economic valuation of habitat defragmentation a study of the veluwe the netherlands abstract this paper offers an economic value assessment of a nature protection programme in the veluwe the netherlands this programme involves two defragmentation scenarios the first scenario connects the central part of the veluwe with river forelands in a north eastern direction i e the meadows of the ijssel river while the second scenario is focussed on defragmentation in a south western direction i e the meadows of the rhine river the valuation is based on a questionnaire that was administered during face to face interviews in the area and through the internet we employ a contingent valuation approach to assess the respondents willingness to pay for the realisation of the defragmentation scenarios it appears that the mean willingness to pay wtp for the two defragmentation scenarios is 162 2 lognormal distribution per respondent because the veluwe is considered a nature park of national importance we performed an aggregation of individual wtp estimates over dutch households with the resulting aggregate estimates we can compare the total costs and benefits of the two scenarios for habitat defragmentation in the veluwe in addition we test whether respondents value the two scenarios equally we also check whether the methods of data collection face to face interviews and internet questionnaires have distinct influences on the stated wtp responses

offshoring the nature of tasks and occupational stability empirical evidence for germany using a large administrative data set of individual employment histories for germany this paper studies the relationship between offshoring and the individual risk of leaving the occupation moreover a rich data set on tasks performed in occupations is used to better characterise the sources of worker vulnerability both material and service offshoring are on average not associated with an increase in occupational outflow rates however this association depends on the nature of tasks performed in the occupation higher intensities of interactive and in particular non routine tasks are associated with a larger decrease or a smaller increase in the occupational hazard rate

factors influencing renewable energy consumption in china an empirical analysis based on provincial panel data abstract the development of renewable energy is the key to deal with climate change and low carbon economy development in china here based on a balanced panel dataset of 30 provinces in china cover the period of 1996 2013 this paper explores the effect of economic growth co 2 emissions foreign trade exports or imports and urbanization on renewable energy consumption at the national and regional levels by using a dynamic system gmm panel model the empirical results show that the influence of economic growth co 2 emissions foreign trade and urbanization on the renewable energy consumption is heterogeneous across regions first economic development has an important positive impact on renewable energy consumption in the four panels we consider and the impact is the greatest in the eastern region follows by the national central and western regions second co 2 emissions have a significant positive impact on renewable energy consumption in the central and national regions however co 2 emissions have a weak negative impact on the consumption of renewable energy in the eastern region and have no impact in the western region third per capita exports are found to have a positive effect on the renewable energy consumption with the greatest impact in the central region followed by the eastern and national regions and have a weak negative impact in the western regions fourth per capita imports have a negative effect on renewable energy consumption in the eastern western and national regions and have a weak positive effect in the central region finally the changes in the urbanization level significantly affect the renewable energy consumption in the four panels we consider and the impact is the greatest in the eastern region with high level of urbanization follow by the central and western regions on the basis of this study we put forward the corresponding countermeasures and suggestions to achieving sustainable development in china

the effect of protest votes on the estimates of wtp for use values of recreational sites contingent valuation studies are often characterized by a considerable number of protest responses which may cause selectivity bias on the final estimates for wtp sample selection models can detect and if necessary correct selectivity bias in economic applications where the relevant dependent variable is continuous sample selection models are generally estimated using heckman s 2 step method rather than the fiml estimator either method has its own drawback computational complexity for the fiml method susceptibility to collinearity problems for the 2 step method using data on valuation of forest resources for recreational use we analyse the performance of the two estimators in this application given the presence of some collinearity the fiml is preferred to the 2 step method a procedure is outlined to deal with selectivity problems in similar settings

offshoring and outsourcing potentials evidence from german micro level data this paper provides two indicators that measure i offshoring potentials cross country geographical relocation and ii outsourcing potentials organisational relocation separately at the level of jobs occupations tasks and industries we use four waves of the bibb baua labour force survey in germany and apply principal component analysis based on a large set of potential determinants of offshoring and outsourcing derived from the literature our results show significant variation across these levels in the determinants of both dimensions we provide a comprehensive empirical classification of the determinants of how easily jobs can be offshored and outsourced this can serve as a basis for further research to investigate the economic effects of job offshoreability

valuing non market wildlife commodities an evaluation and comparison of benefits and costs this paper compares the benefits and costs of nature conversation at three sites of special scientific interest benefits are estimated by contigent valuation expressed preferences and also the travel cost method revealed preferences oppurtunity costs are assessed from a financial cost viewpoint and also in terms of shadow prices or social costs results indicate that the valuation of wildlife and nature conservation largely depends upon the frame of reference adopted that social costs are considerably less than financial costs due to the effect of the common agricultural policy that user benefits are considerably less than financial costs and non user benefits must be included to cover even the social costs of nature conservation

confidence intervals for evaluating benefits estimates from dichotomous choice contingent valuation studies i evaluate the potential usefulness of nonmarket valuation concepts and techniques from environmental economics for improving wildlife conservation the concepts include distinguishing between on site recreation use value and off site passive use or

a new paradigm for valuing non market goods using referendum data maximum likelihood estimation by censored logistic regression abstract this paper challenges the w m hanemann amer j agr econom 66 332 341 1984 and c sellar j p chavas and j r stoll j environ econom management 13 382 390 1986 utilizations of logit models to estimate the value of non market resources from referendum survey data these data are more informative than conventional choice data the random utility interpretation of logit models is therefore too restrictive bypassing the utility function entirely it will be shown that parameters and standard errors for utility theoretic inverse hicksian demand functions can be extracted directly and much more simply estimated demand functions need not be limited to those corresponding to the linear in parameters utility difference specifications which can be handled by packaged logit programs

validation of empirical measures of welfare change a comparison of nonmarket techniques since the passing of the flood control act of 1936 the attention of many resource economists has been directed towards measuring the benefits and costs of alternative uses of natural resources increasingly it has been recognized that the value of some of these uses is not explicitly determined through market transactions this has led to the focus of much attention upon the development of nonmarket methods to estimate the value of these uses in the 1940s the groundwork for the travel cost method was established by hotelling prewitt 1949 following this in the 1960s davis initiated the basic foundation for bidding methods davis 1963 which were later to be subsumed under the heading of contingent valuation methods brookshire randall and stoll 1980 schulze d arge and brookshire 1981 thayer 1981 both of these methods will be further discussed below in addition to these two methods a third approach the unit day value method has been recognized as acceptable but not preferred for the valuation of recreational uses of water and related land resources dwyer kelley and bowes 1977 u s water resources council 1979 given the existence of alternative methods of estimating the value of resource uses several obvious questions arise one of the first of these is under what circumstances is each method most appropriate existing literature has focussed sufficiently on this question and pointed out limitations of each especially the travel cost method and unit day value methods brookshire ives and schulze 1976 dwyer kelly and bowes 1977 freeman 1979 mcconnell 1975 randall ives and eastman 1977 schulze d arge and brook

offshoring tasks and the skill wage pattern the paper investigates the relationship between offshoring wages and the occupational task profile using rich individual level panel data our main results suggest that when only considering within industry changes in offshoring we identify a moderate wage reduction due to offshoring for low skilled workers though wage effects in relation to the task profile of occupations are not estimated with sufficient precision however when allowing for cross industry effects of offshoring i e allowing for labor mobility across industries negative wage effects of offshoring are quite substantial and depend strongly on the task profile of workers occupations a higher degree of interactivity and in particular non routine content effectively shields workers against the negative wage impact of offshoring

an analysis of the implications of china s urbanization policy for economic growth and energy consumption abstract china intends to rely on urbanization policies to increase its economic growth even against the backdrop of new constraints on energy consumption this paper investigates the impact of urbanization on economic growth and energy consumption using data from china s 266 prefecture level cities over the 2000 2010 period and examines the heterogeneity of this impact across income and urbanization groups the main results of our empirical estimation indicate that 1 the effect of urbanization on economic growth is positive and significant for the entire sample although it is positive and significant only for high and middle income groups and not the low income group 2 the impact of urbanization on energy consumption is positive and significant for all groups when the sample is divided into three urbanization groups based on the northam curve indicating that urbanization will lead to large increases in energy consumption in summary our empirical results show that urbanization targets will be difficult to achieve in terms of increasing gdp per capita under energy consumption constraints

the energy growth nexus in thailand does trade openness boost up energy consumption the nexus between trade openness and energy demand is hot topic of discussion among academicians and researchers and numerous studies are available in existing literature while investigating the nexus between trade openness and energy demand this paper explores the relationship between energy consumption trade openness and economic growth in case of thailand in doing so we have applied bayer and hanck cointegration approach to test whether the long run relationship exists between the variables our results confirm the presence of cointegration between the variables energy consumption stimulates economic growth trade openness adds in economic growth the causality analysis reveals that energy consumption granger causes economic growth and in resulting economic growth granger causes energy consumption trade openness and energy consumption are interdependent i e trade openness granger causes energy consumption and in return energy consumption granger causes trade openness this paper openness up new directions for policy making authorities in thailand to design a comprehensive energy and trade policies to sustain economic growth for long run

services offshoring and its impact on productivity and employment evidence from germany 1995 2006 economists have recently recognised services offshoring as an important influence on domestic labour market outcomes services are of particular interest since their significance has grown in terms of both quantity and quality only one and a half decades ago most services were considered non tradable but the emergence and development of new information and communication technologies has made many services internationally tradable the liberalisation of international trade in services trade has further accelerated the volume of services trade our econometric estimations focus on services offshoring by german manufacturing sectors we use revised input output data from 1995 to 2006 we first estimate the impact of services offshoring on labour productivity we then measure the effects of services offshoring on labour demand the results show that services offshoring increased sectoral labour productivity but reduced german manufacturing employment the overall results suggest that labour demand decreased over 1995 2006 because labour reducing productivity and substitution effects dominated labour augmenting scale effects from services offshoring

actual averting expenditure versus stated willingness to pay the purpose of this study is to perform a complete comparison of actual averting expenditure and stated willingness to pay measures and to determine if the averting expenditure is a lower bound of the willingness to pay measured from contingent valuation experiment as suggested by literature in addition to the single value comparison bootstrap krinsky and robb jackknife and cameron are four simulation methods used to calculate confidence intervals for response function sample sizes of 100 200 and 1000 are simulated 100 and 200 times respectively a set of data with 540 households from a contingent policy referendum survey is employed for our purpose under a specific level of bod improvement a one to one single mean value comparison of the actual averting expenditure is greater than the mean willingness to pay from utility difference model the empirical results are consistent with the theoretical expectation for expenditure difference that averting expenditure is a lower bound of willingness to

do protest responses to a contingent valuation question and a choice experiment differ it is suggested that the number of protest responses in stated preference surveys depends inter alia on the valuation method used choice experiments ce are said to generate a lower number of protest responses than contingent valuation cv however no comparison of both methods with respect to protest responses has been conducted to date we used both ce and cv in a survey on forest biodiversity in two german regions protest beliefs were measured for all respondents irrespective of whether they were willing to pay or not the results show no clear pattern of differences between ce and cv regarding protest beliefs and protest responses using an attitude scale based on respondents protest beliefs we see a significant negative effect of this attitude on willingness to pay in both methods however in one of the two study regions the effect is weaker in ce than in cv

improved estimation of willingness to pay in dichotomous choice contingent valuation studies this paper uses recently developed statistical techniques to achieve improved parameter estimates from models ofdichotomoiis choice contingent valuation data random effects associated with bid amounts presented to respondents are modelled alongside the variance of individual responses to give a nested model which more truly reflects the structure of the data being analyzed quasi likelihood methods for estimating parameters in such hierarchical models are discussed and a simulation method for assessing goodness of fit is demonstrated however estimated parameters may still be biased and hence a parametric bootstrap technique is presented and compared to a delta method approximation jel q26

welfare measurements using contingent valuation a comparison of techniques three commonly used techniques of asking contingent valuation questions are compared iterative bidding payment cards and dichotomous choice the results reveal that no single contingent valuation technique is neutral in the elicitation of hicksian surplus and each technique has its strengths and weaknesses the iterative bidding estimates contain a starting point bias while the payment card and dichotomous choice estimates were influenced by the interviewers soliciting the contingent values finally the analysis of dichotomous choice responses involves unresolved issues that warrant further investigation on the other hand dichotomous choice is the easiest technique to administer in a survey setting

limited dependent variables in willingness to pay studies applications in health care the appropriate technique for econometric analysis of wtp willingness to pay data is an issue which has not been addressed in many studies of wtp for health and health care this paper argues that whether an open ended question or a payment scale approach is adopted the way in which wtp is recorded means that limited dependent variable models are more appropriate than standard regression analysis data from an open ended question on wtp for maternity care contain a large proportion of zeros and the evidence suggests that a two part specification performs better than ols or a standard tobit model if the payment scale method is adopted our argument suggests that grouped data regression is an appropriate econometric technique in practice with data from a study in northern norway the results from ols and grouped data regression are broadly similar

marginal wtp and distance decay the role of protest and true zero responses in the economic valuation of recreational water quality we evaluate the sensitivity of distance decay in individuals stated willingness to pay wtp for water quality improvements in eutrophied lakes we extend the standard model of contingent valuation cv by allowing individuals to adopt a sequential evaluation process consisting of two decision stages in the first stage respondents decide whether they are protesters have a wtp true zero or a hbox wtp 0 conditioned on a strictly positive wtp we use lee s selectivity corrected model to determine the magnitude of their wtp in the second stage using cv survey data from norway we find significant distance decay in the first stage classification of respondents as protesters true zero wtp or positive wtp in the second stage model for positive wtp responses we find little or no significant relationships when correcting for selection results suggest that previous findings of significant distance decay in contingent valuation of lake and river water in europe may be driven by the definition of protest and true zero respondents we find that wtp for water quality may be more useful as a qualitative indicator of political support for user financed water quality measures than as a cardinal measure of marginal utility of water quality improvements

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

starting point bias in dichotomous choice valuation with follow up questioning abstract follow up questions are frequently used to improve the efficiency of dichotomous choice contingent valuation questionnaires however a number of authors e g 12 16 have noted a significant difference between the wtp distributions implied by initial and follow up question responses this paper investigates starting point bias as one explanation for the phenomenon we develop a model of starting point bias in the context of dichotomous choice questioning with follow up using a monte carlo simulation to illustrate the potential bias imparted to wtp estimates an application is provided based on data from a cv study in northcentral iowa

causal nexus between energy consumption and economic growth for high middle and low income countries using frequency domain analysis abstract this study aims to investigate the causal nexus between energy consumption and economic growth for 119 countries from all over the world having at least 30 years of available data on candidate variables including 30 high income oecd 13 high income non oecd 65 middle income and 11 low income countries the study employs granger causality in the frequency domain context for empirical analysis which allows one to examine the causal nexus over different frequencies and thus provides relatively a better picture of the causal nexus between the candidate variables in particular we examine the temporary short run as well as at permanent long run causal nexus between energy consumption and economic growth the empirical results suggest that 18 countries including 5 high income oecd 2 high income non oecd 10 middle income and 1 low income confirm the existence of feedback hypothesis 25 countries including 4 high income oecd 3 high income non oecd 14 middle income and 4 low income confirm growth hypothesis out of total 119 countries similarly 40 countries including 6 high income oecd 6 high income non oecd 27 middle income and 1 low income suggest conservation hypothesis while 36 countries comprising of 15 high income oecd 2 high income non oecd 14 middle income and 5 low income hold neutrality hypothesis between energy consumption and economic growth out of 119 countries the findings of the study suggest that an appropriate and effective public policy is required for all sample countries both in the short and long term while considering sustainable economic growth and development

study on decoupling analysis between energy consumption and economic growth in liaoning province abstract since 1978 liaoning province has experienced spectacular economic growth which has led to more energy consumption the purpose of this paper is to explore the decoupling status between energy consumption and economic growth in liaoning province firstly the generalized lmdi method is used to explore the driving forces governing production energy consumption in liaoning province then the combination of tapio decoupling indicator and generalized lmdi method is utilized to study what the decoupling status occurred in liaoning province and why the decoupling status appeared during the study period only four decoupling status occurred expansive negative decoupling expansive coupling weak decoupling and strong decoupling the energy intensity decoupling effect played a positive role in the appearance of decoupling however the economic structure decoupling effect and investment decoupling effect played a negative role in the appearance of decoupling over the study period the energy structure decoupling effect and labour decoupling effect played a relative small role in the appearance of decoupling

spike models in contingent valuation spike models allow for a nonzero probability of zero willingness to pay in referendum style contingent valuation experiments they include many of the often used models as special cases and allow various analyses that are not possible in standard applications in this paper the economic rationale for the spike models and their estimation techniques are discussed and empirical illustrations are provided one study suggests that mean willingness to pay is zero and both studies strongly suggest that median wtp is zero these results have some bearing on the continuing debate of the incentive properties of hypothetical surveys and the construction of scenarios in contingent valuation experiments

allowing for zeros in dichotomous choice contingent valuation models dichotomous choice contingent valuation data are modeled using a mixture distribution the standard parametric survival model is modified such that respondents in the lowest willingness to pay category may have either zero willingness to pay or a small positive willingness to pay in comparison to the standard model the mixture model leads to a dramatic reduction in estimates of mean willingness to pay covariates such as income are found to be more significant in determining the positive portion of the distribution of willingness to pay

protest response and willingness to pay for culturally significant urban trees implications for contingent valuation method the contingent valuation method cvm could assist green space planning management and appreciation by assigning a monetary value to urban trees however the use of cvm is limited by its inherent methodological weaknesses a critical concern is the existence of a large proportion of survey respondents providing zero willingness to pay wtp and that these responses are not amenable to economic theory known as protest responses censoring protest responses from further treatment is a common practice which warrants reconsideration in light of our cvm survey results the survey involved 800 residents requested to state their wtp for preserving the culturally significant stonewall trees in urban hong kong about 28 of respondents returned a zero wtp for all respondents the strength of protest beliefs was assessed and the relationship between protest beliefs and wtp were examined our analysis produced contradictory results some protest items varied negatively with wtp as expected but other items increased with it respondents stated positive wtp harbored latent protest beliefs which are related to non economic preference the findings stand at odds with the assumptions underlying the censoring treatment and raise questions about the validity of wtp estimates these methodological implications should be taken into account in using cvm

a comparative study on decoupling relationship and influence factors between china s regional economic development and industrial energy related carbon emissions abstract to study the relationship between china s regional economic development and industrial carbon emission reveal the major influencing factors and mechanism of carbon emission change in all regions and provide theoretical evidence for governments to formulate emission reduction strategies and policies big data analysis and the tapio extended model were adopted to quantitatively analyse the decoupling relationship between carbon emission and economic growth in eight major regions of china between 1996 and 2012 logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi was also applied to decompose the main factors affecting carbon emission change in all regions the results show that 1 the proportions of industrial energy related to carbon emissions in central china and the beijing tianjin region decreased year by year while the opposite was the case in coastal areas of northern china furthermore the proportions in other regions basically remained unchanged 2 a weak decoupling relation between industry energy carbon emission and economic growth was found in most regions except in northwest china during the period 1996 2000 southwest china south and north coastal regions during the period 2001 2005 beijing and tianjin during the period 2010 2012 energy consumption decoupling factors exerted a consistent positive effect on industry energy carbon emission decoupling with decoupling impact greater than emission factors 3 the overall level of carbon emission reduction technology in china was low and backwards and limited contributions have been made to economic growth and industry energy carbon emission decoupling development emphases of decoupling should be put on energy saving technology promotion industry structure upgrading and energy structure improvement in the future 4 economic intensity effect has exerted the most powerful positive influence on carbon emissions except in developed areas and the positive effect was weaker than that in other regions

protest beliefs in contingent valuation explaining their motivation abstract the definition and treatment of protest responses in contingent valuation cv can have a significant influence on the estimated values of the good in question if these responses are censored in order to understand how protest responses are motivated in a cv about forest biodiversity in germany we used an item battery to identify respondents protest beliefs the items were measured for all respondents irrespective of their willingness to pay wtp in principle then a scale based on these beliefs is taken as a dependent variable of regression analyses in addition to environmental concern we used norms the warm glow of giving and dilemma concern as further explanatory variables the latter focuses on cooperation problems in protecting the environment our results show that protest beliefs are significantly influenced by the explanatory factors furthermore the protest beliefs themselves have a significant effect on the decision to be wtp as well as on the amount of money stated by those who are wtp the censoring of protest responses may therefore be indefensible

renewable energy consumption economic growth nexus for china abstract the aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between renewable energy consumption and economic growth in china for the period 1977 2011 autoregressive distributed lag approach ardl to cointegration and johansen cointegration techniques are employed by including intermittent variables namely carbon dioxide emissions and labor we also employed granger causality test in order to determine the direction of the causality among the variables the results show that there is a bi directional long term causality between renewable energy consumption and economic growth this finding implies that growing economy in china is propitious for the development of renewable energy sector which in turn helps to boost economic growth we also find that labor influences renewable energy consumption in the short term however there is no evidence of long or short run causality between carbon emissions and renewable energy consumption this implies that actual level of renewable energy in china is still insignificant and not considerably exploited in order to contribute to the mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions

multivariate mixed models for open ended contingent valuation data willingness to pay for conservation of monk seals although dichotomous choice dc contingent valuation cv has been recommended by the us noaa blue ribbon panel for large scale contingent valuation studies useful information can still be obtained from smaller open ended oe studies often undertaken as a precursor to a dc survey the cv study considered here was carried out in greece and looked at willingness to pay wtp for protecting the mediterranean monk seal monachus monachus in the aegean area this is the most endangered seal in the world and the application of the cv methodology was the first such application in greece the oe data consist of two responses first a binary response detailing whether or not respondents were in principle prepared to pay for the protection of this seal secondly those respondents who answered yes to the first question were then asked to state their maximum wtp for such protection a multivariate binomial log normal mixture model is used to develop a bid function including explanatory variables such as income sex age and education such a modelling approach provides an alternative to more commonplace tobit estimation however the model is extended to include further information which was collected on

whose job goes abroad international outsourcing and individual job separations this paper focuses on the adjustment costs of globalisation by studying the effects of international outsourcing on individual transitions out of jobs in the danish manufacturing sector for the period 1990 2003 a competing risks duration model that distinguishes between jobto job and job to unemployment transitions is estimated outsourcing is found to increase the unemployment risk of low skilled workers but the quantitative impact is modest outsourcing is also found to reduce the job change hazard rate for all education groups thus the paper provides evidence for small adjustment costs of globalisation

contingent valuation and social choice the contingent valuation method for estimating the existence value of natural resources is examined for psychophysical robustness statistical reliability and economic sensibility extensions of standard models for willingness to pay and suitable econometric techniques for analyzing these models are developed the analysis is applied to a series of experiments on the value of preserving wilderness areas in the western united states the results call into question the reliability of the cv method for estimating existence values

scope effects in contingent valuation does the assumed statistical distribution of wtp matter abstract economic theory assumes that willingness to pay wtp increases with the quantity of the consumed good this implies that there should be a scope effect in contingent valuation studies however in previous issues of ecological economics several authors criticized the contingent valuation cv method for the absence of such effect or its inadequacy in this paper we contribute to this ongoing debate by proposing to systematically apply several wtp statistical distribution assumptions to test for scope effects and check its plausibility following whitehead s 2016 recent recommendations we perform this approach using data from a swiss case study assessing the wtp for an increased surface of forest reserves we find that both mean wtp and scope effects are sensitive to the statistical distribution assumption regarding plausibility scope elasticities provide mixed result and also depend on the assumed statistical distribution of wtp for small sample size cv studies a non parametric analysis a spike model or an open ended format can thus be better suited to reveal scope effects than the classical parametric dichotomous choice analysis we thus recommend to systematically apply several statistical distribution assumptions of wtp to test for scope effects and their plausibility

applying the copula approach to sample selection modelling the limited availability of tractable multivariate distributions undermines the validity of the standard parametric approach to sample selection modelling copula distributions can be very useful in situations where the applied researcher has a prior on the distributional form of the margins since the modelling of the latter is separated from that of the dependence structure the present article first presents an application to female work data afterwards the approach is analysed in an application to contingent valuation data on recreational values of forests it is shown that the copula approach is especially beneficial in case of strong departures from the hypothesis of normality

nonparticipation or misspecification the impacts of nonparticipation on dichotomous choice contingent valuation dichotomous choice or referendum contingent valuation surveys have become the predominate choice for valuing goods and services otherwise not valued in a standard market nonmarket goods and services a number of researchers have recently recommended that dichotomous choice contingent valuation studies include a follow up question to all no responses to determine whether the no response is a result of unwillingness to pay or nonparticipation if the goal of the study is to investigate the impact of covariates on either mean willingness to pay or the probability of nonparticipation simple identification of indifferent individuals will not suffice a simulation study shows that existing econometric models designed to account for nonparticipation are extremely sensitive to misspecification bias accurate identification of the probability of nonparticipation is hampered by potential misspecification of the distribution of willingness to pay

unemployment insurance and unemployment spells this paper tests the effects of the level and length of unemployment insurance benefits on unemployment durations the paper particularly studies individual behavior during the weeks just prior to when benefits lapse higher unemployment insurance benefits are found to have a strong negative effect on the probability of leaving unemployment however the probability of leaving unemployment rises dramatically just prior to when benefits lapse individual data are used with accurate information of spell durations and the level and length of benefits the semiparametric estimation techniques used in the paper yield more plausible estimates than conventional approaches and provide useful diagnostics copyright 1990 by the econometric society

globalization outsourcing and wage inequality there is considerable debate over whether international trade has contributed to the declining economic fortunes of less skilled workers one issue that has become lost in the current discussion is how firms respond to import competition and how these responses in turn are transmitted to the labor market in previous work we have argued that outsourcing by which we mean the import of intermediate inputs by domestic firms has contributed to an increase in the relative demand for skilled labor in the united states if firms respond to import competition from low wage countries by moving non skill intensive activities abroad then trade will shift employment towards skilled workers within industries in this paper we extend our previous work by combining new import data from the revised nber trade database with disaggregated data on input purchases from the census of manufactures we construct industry by industry estimates of outsourcing for the period 1972 1990 and reexamine whether outsourcing has contributed to an increase in relative demand for skilled labor our main finding is that outsourcing can account for 31 51 of the increase in the relative demand for skilled labor that occurred in u s manufacturing industries during the 1980s compared to our previous estimate of 15 33 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

occupational specificity of human capital we find that returns to occupational tenure are substantial everything else being constant 5 years of occupational tenure are associated with an increase in wages of 12 20 moreover when occupational experience is taken into account tenure with an industry or employer has relatively little importance in accounting for the wage one receives this finding is consistent with human capital being occupation specific

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

using neuroeconomics to understand environmental valuation contingent valuation choice experiments and other stated preference methods are frequently used to capture the nonmarket valuation of natural resources and ecosystem services the emerging field of neuroeconomics which assesses the neuroscience underlying decision making plots a promising course to explore the mechanisms underlying complex environmental valuation decisions neuroeconomic methods offer a unique capacity to isolate value components that contribute to willingness to pay wtp separating an individual s response to natural resource attributes that are of interest to economists from other attributes or influences on the decision process neuroimaging data can also aid in understanding differences in response between preference elicitation techniques and identifying the use of different decision processes and heuristics during valuation this article surveys the benefits and limitations of using neuroeconomics methods to assess the value of environmental goods and focuses on three examples where neuroeconomics may inform environmental valuation protest responses comparison of hypothetical and consequential choice contexts and the evaluation of environmental attributes and optimization of study design in stated choice experiments neuroeconomics methods offer a foundation for positive collaboration between environmental economists and cognitive neuroscientists yielding metrics that complement and augment current stated preference methods of determining environmental valuation

protest responses in contingent valuation a significant number of respondents to contingent valuation surveys tend to either state a zero bid or refuse to state a bid at all for reasons associated with the process of valuation these protest responses are routinely removed from contingent valuation samples because it is assumed that they are not indicative of respondents true values the censoring of protest responses has led to the emergence of a definitional controversy one view is that the definition of protest responses and the rules for censoring them are dependent on whether the practitioner conceives of the contingent valuation survey as a market or as a referendum however what is not acknowledged is the possibility that protest responses and their meaning may vary according to the type of good being valued the elicitation format and the interaction between these elements and external factors this potential renders the development of unambiguous rules for censoring protest responses difficult moreover when willingness to pay is viewed as a behavioural intention it becomes important to determine what the responses actually mean this approach does not assume an interpretative position a priori against which the responses should be judged but seeks to inform an existing understanding which is inadequate

determinants of visitors willingness to pay for the national marine park of zakynthos greece abstract we examined the influence of visitors profile information sources environmental dispositions and visit evaluation on visitors willingness to pay wtp for the national marine park of zakynthos regarding wtp amounts pledged parameters of visit evaluation were the most significant predictors the estimated annual revenue that could be gained could cover the operating costs of the protected area management body visitor and visit characteristics were not significant determinants of visitor responses to the payment principle question while they explained a relatively small amount of variation in the wtp amount multiple regression model nationality was not a significant predictor of wtp all the same greek visitors showed more signs of pro environmental attitudes than foreign ones non use values dominated over use values and higher wtp amounts were associated with bequest value an alternative classification of the valuation system alleged to justify wtp is proposed where option value could be arranged together with use value components under the assumption that future use could still be regarded as another form of use value moreover existence and bequest values could be approached separately under the hypothesis that the former is expected to be associated with relatively lower wtp amounts pledged while the latter is expected to lead to relatively higher wtp amounts our study adds to the complexity and context dependency of wtp determinants park managers are suggested to organize environmental education programs that could decrease visitors consensus estimation error and act as a feedback through word of mouth information gained by friends and relatives

winners and losers a micro level analysis of international outsourcing and wages our paper investigates the link between international outsourcing and wages utilizing a large household panel and combining it with industry level information on industries outsourcing activities from input output tables this approach avoids prob lems such as aggregation bias potential endogeneity bias and poor skill definitions that commonly hamper industry level studies we find that outsourcing has had a marked impact on wages applying two alternative skill classifications we find evidence that a 1 percentage point increase in outsourcing reduced the wage for workers in the lowest skill categories by up to 1 5 while it increased wages for high skilled workers by up to 2 6 this result is robust to a number of different specifications jel classification f16 j31 gagnants et perdants une analyse micro economique de la sous traitance internationale et des salaires ce memoire etudie le lien entre la sous traitance internationale et les salaires a l aide de donnees d un grand panel de menages qu on combine avec des donnees au niveau des industries sur les activites de sous traitance de celles qui en font obtenues des tableaux interindustriels cette approche evite les problemes qui habituellement polluent les etudes au niveau de l industrie biais d agregation biais d endogeneite potentielle mauvaises definitions des habiletes on decouvre que la sous traitance a un effet sur les salaires a l aide de differentes formes de classification des habiletes il appert qu un point de pourcentage d augmentation dans la sous traitance reduit les salaires des travailleurs dans les categories d habilete les plus basses de 1 5 alors qu il accroit les salaires de travailleurs specialises de 2 6 ce resultat est robuste et avere meme quand on utilise diverses specifications

the returns to computer use revisited have pencils changed the wage structure too are the large measured wage differentials for on the job computer use a true return to computer skills or do they just reflect that higher wage workers use computers on their jobs we examine this issue with three large cross sectional surveys from germany first we confirm that the estimated wage differential associated with computer use in germany is very similar to the u s differential second we also measure large differentials for on the job use of calculators telephones pens or pencils or for those who work while sitting down we argue that these findings cast some doubt on the literal interpretation of the computer use wage differential as reflecting true returns to computer use or skill

estimating benefits for effective enforcement of speed reduction from dichotomous choice cv we present an empirical estimation of the distribution of wtp foreffective speed restriction via implementation of local trafficcalming schemes random samples are drawn from the populations ofhouseholds henceforth hhs of three centres intersected by maintrunk roads with varying through traffic conditions we estimatethe underlying wtp distributions from discrete choice responsesto site specific referendum contingent valuation studiesaccounting for zero bidders we then test the hypothesis ofdifferent distributions across villages the statistical analysisconsists first of a parametric specification and then of atotally non parametric one stated welfare changes for effectivespeed reduction are found to be sizeable and the parameters ofthe random utility models are plausibly related to differences inobjective speed measures across centres the results appear toencourage the use of the referencum cv method in the estimationof local public goods in this case study the proposed publicproject would seem to pass the kaldor hicks potentialcompensation test

the heckman correction for sample selection and its critique this paper gives a short overview of monte carlo studies on the usefulness of heckman s 1976 1979 two step estimator for estimating selection models such models occur frequently in empirical work especially in microeconometrics when estimating wage equations or consumer expenditures it is shown that exploratory work to check for collinearity problems is strongly recommended before deciding on which estimator to apply in the absence of collinearity problems the full information maximum likelihood estimator is preferable to the limited information two step method of heckman although the latter also gives reasonable results if however collinearity problems prevail subsample ols or the two part model is the most robust amongst the simple to calculate estimators

service offshoring and productivity evidence from the us the practice of sourcing service inputs from overseas suppliers has been growing in response to new technologies that have made it possible to trade in some business and computing services that were previously considered non tradable this paper estimates the effects of offshoring on productivity in us manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2000 it finds that service offshoring has a significant positive effect on productivity in the united states accounting for around 10 per cent of labour productivity growth during this period offshoring material inputs also have a positive effect on productivity but the magnitude is smaller accounting for approximately 5 per cent of productivity growth

comparisons of decoupling trends of global economic growth and energy consumption between developed and developing countries abstract the development of economy in developing countries is expected to contribute mostly to the growth of world energy consumption using environment impact gdp technology igt decoupling model we carry out a comparative study on the decoupling trends of economic growth and energy consumption for both developed and developing countries in past five decades 1965 2015 the results indicate that the decoupling indices of developed countries are superior to that of developing countries the specific performances are 1 the decoupling indices of developed countries are shown to be stable and tend to approximate absolute decoupling 2 the decoupling indices of developing countries fluctuate in the relative decoupling interval on this basis this research employs grey relational analysis gra to explore the reasons resulting in the difference of decoupling indices from the perspective of technical progress industrial structure and economic growth pattern the findings show that in developed countries technical progress factor exerts greatest influence on decoupling indices followed by industrial structure and economic growth pattern in developing countries industrial structure and economic growth pattern have greater impact on decoupling indices than technical progress based on research conclusion this research offers developing countries relevant policy suggestions for energy saving and emission reduction in the future

modelling zero values and protest responses in contingent valuation surveys in contingent valuation surveys the category of zero bidders refers to individuals that are not willing to pay anything for the programme under analysis specific questions can help to identify true zero values coming from people that are indifferent to the programme separately from protest responses the latter are generally excluded from the analysis this paper introduces a mixture sample selection model that takes into account both zero values and protest responses in the estimates the model is applied to the valuation of a traffic calming scheme aimed at reducing risks for residents in three villages in the north east of england

a multilevel modelling approach to triple bounded dichotomous choice contingent valuation the use of dichotomous choice dc questions in the elicitation of willingness to pay wtp in contingent valuation studies is common practice at the present time recent research has shown that double bounded dc questions provide statistically superior results to single bounded questions given an appropriate sampling design this paper uses a relatively new multilevel modelling technique to analyze a triple bounded dc design which in addition includes an initial non monetary question on whether an individual accepts in principle a wtp some unspecified amount the theoretical basis of the multilevel model used is described and some of the possibilities of this potentially powerful and versatile technique are discussed the practical operation of the multilevel model is demonstrated using data from a contingent valuation study conducted in the norfolk broads england an internationally important wetland resource

protesting and justifying a latent class model for contingent valuation with attitudinal data this article develops a latent class model for estimating willingness to pay wtp for public goods using simultaneously contingent valuation cv and attitudinal data to identify individuals with similar characteristics such as wtp and protest attitudes we find evidence that the answer to the cv question influences the responses to the attitudinal questions in our case this influence reflects rational behavior budget constraint issues and justification biases related to protest reasons such as lack of trust in institutions or fairness issues with respect to the distribution of the burden of preservation the results from our empirical application confirm the importance of accounting for those biases

determinants of the price premium for green energy evidence from an oecd cross section using data from a survey of households in 11 oecd countries this paper investigates the determinants of preferences for a completely green residential electricity system three important questions are addressed i how much are households willing to pay to use only renewable energy ii does willingness to pay wtp vary significantly across household groups and countries and iii what drives the decision to enter the hypothetical market for green energy and given entry what drives the level of wtp the analysis here differs from previous studies on green energy in two ways first data and analyses are comparable across countries and second a comprehensive attempt is made to understand 0 wtp and to accommodate using a censored quantile regression cqr framework unobserved heterogeneity the survey data indicate a low wtp at 11 12 of current electric bill this study also addresses a key question how important is income for understanding wtp relative to more attitudinal determinants the effect of income overall appears ambiguous with tobit like models indicating that income is not significant while the cqr indicates that income exerts a significant effect near the center of the distribution of wtp across all frameworks used a key determinant of wtp appears to be environmental attitudes particularly membership in an environmental organization

leaving teaching in the uk a duration analysis in this paper the authors analyze the decision by teachers to leave the profession their results affirm the importance of relative earnings in the tenure and turnover decisions of teachers the econometric modeling approach used yields important insights into the appropriateness of adopting a flexible semiparametric specification of the duration dependence structure and of the unobserved heterogeneity distribution in duration models copyright 1995 by royal economic society