consumer surplus from discrete choice models abstract the budget constrained random utility model rum gives utility consistent measures of welfare but requires the length of the planning period be specified an alternative is to treat the rum probabilities as behavioral and calculate consumer surplus this paper shows that such calculations lead to the same welfare measures as rum calculations the paper provides support and an alternative justification for the standard welfare measured

causal independence between energy consumption and economic growth in liberia evidence from a non parametric bootstrapped causality test abstract this contribution investigates causal interdependence between energy consumption and economic growth in liberia and proposes application of a bootstrap methodology to better reflect causality employment is incorporated as additional variable the study demonstrates evidence of distinct bidirectional granger causality between energy consumption and economic growth additionally the results show that employment in liberia granger causes economic growth and apply irrespective of the short run or long run evidence from a monte carlo experiment reveals that the asymptotic granger causality test suffers size distortion problem for liberian data suggesting that the bootstrap technique employed in this study is more appropriate given the empirical results implications are that energy expansion policies like energy subsidy or low energy tariff for instance would be necessary to cope with demand exerted as a result of economic growth in liberia furthermore liberia might have the performance of its employment generation on the economy partly determined by adequate energy therefore it seems fully justified that a quick shift towards energy production based on clean energy sources may significantly slow down economic growth in liberia hence the government s target to implement a long term strategy to make liberia a carbon neutral country and eventually less carbon dependent by 2050 is understandable

informational implications of interest rate rules this paper compares interest rate and money supply rules the analysisis conducted within a rational expectations macro model that incorporates flexible prices and informational frictions with differential information interest rate targets can affect the information content of market prices and real activity but these realconsequences can always be replicated by an appropriately chosen moneystock rule with feedback to economic activity however when the policyauthority lacks information about the state of the economic system itfaces a discrete choice between an interest rate peg and strict moneystock control copyright 1986 by american economic association

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

valuation and management of wetland ecosystems we recently completed a study of wetland values in coastal louisiana that employed both willingness to pay and energy analysis based methodologies and were able to bracket a range of values within which we feel fairly confident the true value lies however a large amount of uncertainty remains our current estimates of the total prsent value of an average acre of natural wetlands in louisiana are us 2429 6400 per acre assuming an 8 discount rate to 8977 17000 per acre assuming a 3 discount rate at the lowest value the current annual rate of loss of louisiana wetlands 50 sq miles per year is worth about 77 million at the largest value it is worth about 544 million in this paper we a discuss the fundamental theoretical and practical problems underlying natural resources valuation b summarize our methods and findings for louisiana wetlands and c elaborate on some of the more recalcitrant problems attending applied natural resource valuation including discounting and dealing with uncertainty and imprecision the discount rate makes more difference in the final result than any other one factor and yet there is much disagreement about the appropriate approach to discounting natural resources we discuss the discounting problem as applied to natural resources and argue for lower discount rates for valuing renewable natural resources than apply for other aspects of the economy it now seems clear that no reasonable amount of effort will produce very precise estimates of wetland values and we suspect this is also the case for several other classes of natural resources we elaborate a wetlands asurance bonding system to address these problems

combining revealed and stated preference methods to value environmental amenities at residential locations this paper combines an established revealed preference method discrete choice he donic analysis and a relatively new stated refer ence method choice based conjoint analysis in order to estimate more accurately the aesthetic benefits generated by the presence and quality of environmental amenities associated with residen tial locations it applies the combined approach to the housing market of fairfield connecticut which contains several environmental amenities and is experiencing an improvement in the quality of its coastal wetlands due to active restoration efforts jel q26

rational expectations and the effects of government debt abstract this paper incorporates the effects of government debt into a standard rational expectations macroeconomic model due to limited current information even when the most extreme propositions about fiscal neutrality are true there are output and interest rate effects of unanticipated changes in government debt therefore the observation of a positive correlation between government deficits and output or interest rates does not imply that government bonds are net wealth

improving environmental valuation estimates through consistent use of revealed and stated preference information abstract environmental valuation data from stated and revealed preference methods are integrated into a unified model of preferences for environmental quality improvement that identifies the use and nonuse components of the total value estimate this articulates clearly what parts of the total value estimate come from each type of data and permits tests of whether estimated preferences satisfy weak complementarity between the environmental good of interest and related private goods the statistical advantages of using more information for the valuation problem are exploited while retaining flexibility to identify value estimates from any individual method of analysis

identifying willingness to pay for heterogeneous goods with factorial survey methods abstract it has been difficult to estimate underlying willingness to pay parameters for attributes of heterogeneous goods such as environmental quality though hedonic price functions this paper links sociological factorial survey analysis with hedonic price analysis vignettes are multidimensional vectors constructed orthogonally differences among vignette ratings allow estimation of individual valuations of the attributes the paper establishes a theoretical framework linking the two analyses vignette and hedonic price functions are then estimated and linked at the margin to provide dollar values for marginal vignette ratings ratios of these ratings are then used to impute willingness to pay for attributes

hedonic amenity valuation and functional form specification this paper uses gis data to develop variables representing the physical extent and visibility of surrounding land use cover features in a hedonic model of a rural suburban residential housing market three equations are estimated to determine if views

how family networks drive residential location choices evidence from a stated preference field experiment in bogota colombia this research quantifies the relative importance of proximity to extended family networks in the stated residential location choices of bogota s low to middle income residents by applying a conditional logistic regression model and using data from an original choice experiment i find that the surveyed individuals prefer living near their extended family and on average prioritise it more than accessibility to the central business district those who have relied on help from extended family members in a personal or economic crisis situation have a stronger preference for living near extended family compared with those who have not as do those who are able to rely on extended family ties for childcare assistance

price level determinacy with an interest rate policy rule and rational expectations abstract this paper reconsiders a result obtained by sargent and wallace namely that price level indeterminacy obtains in their model if the monetary authorities adopt a feedback rule for the interest rate rather than the money stock it is shown that the indeterminacy vanishes if the interest rate rule is chosen so as to have a desired effect on the expected quantity of money demanded this holds even if considerable weight is given in the choice of a rule to the aim of smoothing interest rate fluctuations

perceptions versus objective measures of environmental quality in combined revealed and stated preference models of environmental valuation abstract this study examines perceptions and objective attribute measures in discrete choice models of recreation site choice behavior these forms of attribute measurement are examined in individual and combined revealed preference stated preference models our results suggest that the model based on perceptions slightly outperforms the models based on objective attribute measures however issues such as the definition of the choice set and the measurement of welfare present significant challenges when using perceptions data

valuing product attributes using single market data a comparison of hedonic and discrete choice approaches this paper compares via simulation the perfor mance of the multinomial logit and hedonic models in esti mating consumer preferences for product attributes we as cribe preferences over the attributes of houses to a population of consumers and by having them bid for a set of houses calculate equilibrium prices the resulting data are used to estimate the two models we find that the gradient of a linear box cox hedonic price function estimates marginal attribute bids at least as well as a linear logit model although the difference between the two is small when some variables are not observed or are replaced by proxies the logit model however outperforms the he donic model in valuing non marginal attribute changes this is true when the researcher knows the true form of consumers utility functions and when the utility function must be approx irnated

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

wealth effects of open market operations and optimal monetary policy abstract equilibrium models of the business cycle such as those developed by lucas 1973 and barro 1976 barro 1980 are often used to analyze the effects of monetary disturbances on the economy these models typically view monetary injections as arising through lump sum transfer payments that are independent of an agent s holdings of money this paper examines the effects caused by misperceptions about money for the more realistic case when money is injected through open market operations the major result is that unperceived open market operations have a negative wealth effect

the information content of the interest rate and optimal monetary policy optimal monetary policy rules are derived in a rational expectations cum contracting framework monetary policy is redundant if wage setters exploit the incomplete current information embodied in today s nominal interest rate however the monetary authorities can save wage setters the costs of indexing to the interest rate a contemporaneous money supply feedback rule is as effective as wage indexation a lagged rule relevant under a regime of money supply targeting is also as effective if investors use the interest rate both rules have the same implications for the real interest rate as poole s combination policy however the two rules have strikingly different implications for the nominal interest rate

combining revealed and stated preference data to estimate preferences for residential amenities a gmm approach we show how stated preference information obtained from a choice experiment and revealed preference information based on housing market transactions can be combined via generalized method of moments gmm estimation specifically we use a moment condition matching the predicted marginal willingness to pay wtp from a first stage hedonic model to the marginal wtp formula implied by the choice experiment utility function this is coupled with other moments from the choice experiment to produce gmm based estimates of parameters that reflect the strengths of each data source our application values remediation of a contaminated site in buffalo new york and we find evidence in support of estimates arising from our approach jel q51 q53

monetary instruments and policy rules in a rational expectations environment abstract this paper explores the implications of rational expectations and the aggregate supply theory advanced by lucas 1973 and barro 1976 for analysis of optimal monetary policy under uncertainty along the lines of poole 1970 returning to a topic initially treated by sargent and wallace 1975 not surprisingly these two classical concepts alter both the menu of feasible policy choice and the desirability of certain policy actions in our setup unlike that of sargent and wallace 1975 the systematic component of monetary policy is a relevant determinant of the magnitude of business fluctuations that arise from shocks to the system central bank behavior both the selection of monetary instruments and the framing of overall policy response to economic conditions can work to diminish or increase the magnitude of business fluctuations however the activist policies stressed by the present discussion bear little if any relationship to the policy options rationalized by the conventional analysis of monetary policy under uncertainty in particular in contrast to poole s analysis money supply responses to the nominal interest rate are not important determinants of real economic activity rather the central bank should focus on policies that make movements in the general price level readily identifiable by economic agents