the shadow of death analysing the pre exit productivity of portuguese manufacturing firms the pre exiting productivity profile of mature firms relative to survivors is examined along with an evaluation of how productivity affects the probability of exit along various dimensions an empirical approach based on an unbalanced panel of portuguese manufacturing firms covering a 10 year period is used the findings confirm that market selection forces low productivity firms to exit but there is also evidence that a sizeable portion of low productivity firms do not shut down conversely there is a non negligible fraction of high productivity firms that do actually close consistent with some key theoretical predictions our analysis reveals that exiting firms have a falling productivity level over a number of years prior to exit finally the results from the survival model show that both small firms and ones with low productivity are relatively much more likely to exit the market industry and macro environment are also found to have a non negligible role on the exit of mature firms

the effect of agglomeration economies on firm deaths a comparison of firm and regional based approaches this paper compares the merits of regional and firm based approaches for analysing the effect of agglomeration economies on firm deaths in ireland we aggregate a comprehensive data set on irish fi

balanced and unbalanced growth abstract a model is developed that shows how two sectors or regions interact out of steady state through product labor and capital markets and how if the former interaction dominates the growth of one sector pulls along the growth of the other while if the latter interactions dominate one sector or region booms while the other declines it is then shown why liberalization of foreign trade should lead to a transition from a lower to a higher steady state growth rate and why during the course of this transition growth might initially be even slower than before liberalization

erratum to balanced and unbalanced growth journal of development economics 53 1997 41 66 abstract a model is developed that shows how two sectors or regions interact out of steady state through product labor and capital markets and how if the former interaction dominates the growth of one sector pulls along the growth of the other while if the latter interactions dominate one sector or region booms while the other declines it is then shown why liberalization of foreign trade should lead to a transition from a lower to a higher steady state growth rate and why during the course of this transition growth might initially be even slower than before liberalization

new firm startups technology and macroeconomic fluctuations new firm startup activity is examined within a framework pooling a cross section of 117 industries over six time periods between 1976 and 1986 a model is introduced relating startup activity both to elements of the business cycle in particular the macroeconomic growth rate the cost of capital and the unemployment rate and to industry specific characteristics especially the technological conditions underlying the industry the pooled cross section regression results suggest that macroeconomic fluctuations as well as industry specific elements contribute to startup activity while new firm startups respond positively to macroeconomic growth they are promoted by a low cost of capital and high unemployment rate a somewhat surprising result is that new firm startups are not apparently deterred in capital intensive industries and where r d expenditures play an important role the empirical results suggest that new firms may be able to overcome their inherent size and experience disadvantages in such markets through exploiting university research and pursuing innovative activity

an experimental validation of hypothetical wtp for a recyclable product using a within subject experiment we compare hypothetical andreal willingness to pay wtp for an improvement in therecyclability of a product subjects are faced with a real paymentscenario after they have responded to a hypothetical question contrary to most of the results obtained in similar studies at apopulation level there are no significant median differencesbetween actual and hypothetical stated values of wtp however within subject comparisons between hypothetical and actual valuesindicate that subjects stating a low high hypothetical wtp tendto underestimate overestimate the value of their actualcontributions

willingness to pay to reduce mortality risks evidence from a three country contingent valuation study valuing a change in the risk of death is a key input into the calculation of the benefits of environmental policies that save lives typically such risks are monetized using the value of a statistical life vsl since the majority of the lives saved by environmental policies are those of older persons there has been much recent debate about whether the vsl should be lower for the elderly to reflect their fewer remaining life years we conducted a contingent valuation survey in the uk italy and france designed to answer this question the survey was administered in these three countries following a standardized protocol our results suggest that the vsl is 1 022 million or 2 264 million depending on whether we use median or mean wtp the vsl is not significantly lower for older persons but is higher for persons who have been admitted to a hospital or emergency room for cardiovascular and respiratory problems income is positively and significantly associated with wtp the income elasticities of the wtp increase gradually with income levels and are between 0 15 and 0 5 for current income levels in eu countries we use the responses to the wtp questions to estimate the value of an extension in remaining life expectancy the value of a loss of one year s life expectancy is 54 000 or 163 000

valuing tourism demand attributes to guide climate change adaptation measures efficiently the case of the spanish domestic travel market abstract climate change cc may have substantial impacts on the distribution of current tourist flows by changing patterns of seasonal volumes of tourist demand such impacts are of potential importance for the spanish coastal tourism destinations in a context where the implementation of adaptation measures becomes relevant to counteract the expected cc induced travel market share losses this paper examines the role of preference analysis in the design of cc adaptation policies using data from the 2005 familitur survey on summer domestic tourist flows a destination choice model is implemented to 1 highlight the role of temperature and its relationship with other destination specific attributes 2 estimate cc induced changes in travel market shares and 3 compute the economic value tourists assign to a set of destination assets as a way to better permit the recovery the expected market share losses by regional tourism authorities

precision of dichotomous choice contingent valuation welfare measures some simulation results the purpose of this research is to examine the roles of individuals heterogeneous economic factors and model misspecification in dichotomous choice contingent valuation welfare measurement willingness to pay for an improvement of environmental quality is studied simulation results indicate that the precision of welfare estimates increases with individuals income levels and decreases with the price of the quality related good the dependence of the consumption of the quality related good on the environmental quality also affects the reliability of welfare estimates

uncovering context induced status quo effects in choice experiments abstract in this study five design dimensions are varied systematically investigating context induced status quo effects in choice experiments additionally two structural complexity measures entropy and the number of attribute level changes are used to capture status quo effects from the similarity between alternatives and the number of trade offs a crucial finding is that the frequency of status quo choices is negatively associated with the number of alternatives indicating preference matching effects by contrast the probability of choosing the status quo increases with a higher number of choice tasks a wider level range and the similarity between alternatives status quo choices are further affected by the current environmental situation perceived by respondents we also find that marginal and non marginal welfare estimates are significantly affected by the choice design one key finding is that the most used choice task format in environmental economics i e two hypothetical and a status quo alternative is likely to increase the propensity to choose the status quo option

gender differences in firm performance evidence from new ventures in the united states abstract prior studies examining the performance of female and male owned firms have generally reported that female owned firms underperform male owned firms however it is conceivable that the performance measures used by previous studies and or their inability to control for key demographic differences may have contributed to this finding for example few studies use size adjusted performance measures and yet we know that female owned firms tend to be smaller than their male counterparts similarly risk is typically not considered even though evidence suggests that women tend to be more risk averse than men we use a longitudinal five year database of more than 4000 new ventures that began operations in the u s in 2004 to determine whether potential differences in the performances of female and male owned firms disappear when appropriate performance measures are used and important demographic differences are controlled for in the models the performance measures we examine include 4 year closure rates return on assets roa and a risk adjusted measure sharpe ratio univariate test results confirm our expectation based on both liberal and social feminist theory that there is no difference in the performance of female and male owned new ventures provided performance is appropriately measured further these results are supported by our multivariate analyses which control for demographic differences such as industry experience and hours worked our findings should be of interest to researchers financiers advisors and policy makers perhaps more importantly our findings should also ensure that women who are contemplating starting a new venture are not discouraged from doing so by a false belief that new ventures initiated by women are less likely to succeed than those initiated by men

explaining the appearance and success of open space referenda many communities in the united states have begun enacting policies to preserve open space often through local voter referenda new jersey sponsors such municipal action through the green acres program by providing funding and low interest loans to towns that choose to increase property taxes and spend the money raised on open space preservation for the purposes of conservation and or recreation this paper endeavors to understand which factors contribute to the appearance and success of these measures although previous literature has examined this issue this is the first study to account for spatial dependence spatial autocorrelation and to explore dynamic issues through survival analysis the traditional two stage model from the literature is extended by incorporating a bayesian spatial probit for the first stage and a maximum likelihood spatial error model in the second stage a cox proportional hazard model is used to examine the timing of referenda appearance spatial dependence is found in the second stage of the analysis indicating that future studies should account for its influence there is no strong evidence for spatial dependence or correlation in the first stage the survival model is found to be a useful complement to the traditional probit analysis of the first stage

do reminders of substitutes and budget constraints influence contingent valuation estimates a test is performed of the recommendation by the noaa panel on contingent valuation that respondents be reminded about other substitute resources and their budget constraint prior to answering the willingness to pay wtp question the context for this experiment is a cvm study of the benefits from reducing fire hazards to old growth forests in oregon the test was performed using two mail surveys that were otherwise identical except for the inclusion of reminder statements prior to the wtp question the dichotomous choice logit equations were not statistically different between versions and the mean wtp results were identical

nudging the poor and the rich a field study on the distributional effects of green electricity defaults abstract choice defaults are an increasingly popular public policy tool yet there is little knowledge of the distributional consequences of such nudges for different groups in society we report results from an elicitation study in the residential electricity market in switzerland in which we contrast consumers actual contract choices under an existing default regime with the same consumers active choices in a survey presenting the same choice set without any default we find that the default is successful at curbing greenhouse gas emissions but it leads poorer households to pay more for their electricity consumption than they would want to while leaving a significant willingness to pay for green electricity by richer households untapped

combining revealed and stated preferences consistency tests and their interpretations this article models the recreation demand for iowa wetlands combining survey data on both actual usage patterns i e revealed preferences rps and anticipated changes to those patterns under hypothetical increases in trip costs i e stated preferences sps we formulate and test specific hypotheses concerning potential sources of bias in each approach and discuss what can be learned about the validity of the models from such tests

waiting or acting now the effect on willingness to pay of delivering inherent uncertainty information in choice experiments abstract this paper analyzes the effect of inherent uncertainty on the willingness to pay wtp for a policy aimed at reducing expected climate change impacts to do this it relates outcome uncertainty to the probability of occurrence of one of these impacts within a given time horizon unlike the existing studies this paper links outcome uncertainty to the uncontrollable component of environmental uncertainty derived from the stochastic nature of an ecosystem s behavior results show that the wtp for the policy in the presence of uncertainty does not decrease compared to the scenario where climate change impacts are assumed to occur with certainty this suggests individuals are adopting a precautionary attitude when stating their wtp thus the paper provides economic justification for preventive measures in highly uncertain contexts however findings are not conclusive with respect to the influence of the degree of uncertainty on the support for such measures

the relationship between firm growth size and age estimates for 100 manufacturing industries this study uses a sample of all firms operating in 100 manufacturing industries to examine some aspects of firm dynamics it finds that firm growth the variability of firm growth and the probability that a firm will fail decrease with firm age it also finds that firm growth decreases at a diminishing rate with firm size even after controlling for the exit of slow growing firms from the sample gibrat s law therefore fails although the severity of the failure decreases with firm size copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

do respondents adjust their expected utility in the presence of an outcome certainty attribute in a choice experiment in a stated preference valuation survey the expected benefits of environmental policies are generally presented to respondents without reference to the fact that the predicted outcomes are rarely known with certainty this omission may reduce the credibility of the valuation scenario and contribute to hypothetical bias in the study outlined in this paper a choice experiment was conducted to elicit values for environmental improvements in the great barrier reef australia with outcome certainty included as a separate attribute different specifications of the utility functions which imply different behavioural assumptions about the way choices have been made generate variations in value estimates results showed that respondents incorporate outcome certainty into their decisions but that an expected utility formulation represented by the interaction between environmental protection and likelihood of occurrence underestimated environmental values some environmental protection values appear to be independent of outcome certainty which may be consistent with existence values and other non use categories a partial expected utility model is cautiously recommended

decomposition of new venture growth into firm age survey period and vintage effects firm data are accumulated on a yearly basis in view of the linear relationship of firm age foundation year survey year the fluctuations of firm data classified by age and period cannot be decomposed into age period and cohort foundation year effects three decomposition methods are briefly reviewed and applied to japanese data on new ventures founded since 1995 regarding sales and employment growth the age effect is the largest with a downward trend and the cohort effect is negligible regarding labour productivity the age effect indicates upward movements and the cohort effect is negligible the reason of the negligible cohort effect is discussed

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

gender specific starting point bias in choice experiments evidence from an empirical study abstract in this paper we test whether preferences and willingness to pay estimates obtained in a choice experiment study are susceptible to starting point bias as is often the case in dichotomous choice contingent valuation studies on the basis of a multinomial probit model we find that preferences are indeed susceptible to starting point bias in a split sample design our results suggest that varying the price levels displayed in a so called instructional choice set presented prior to the actual preference eliciting choice sets significantly impacts respondents preferences and willingness to pay for protecting danish nature areas from new motorway development in particular our results show that the bias is gender specific only female respondents are significantly affected results further reveal that the impact of the starting point bias decays as respondents evaluate more and more choice sets this supports the discovered preference hypothesis and on the basis of this we suggest a number of ways to potentially mitigate the starting point bias

the death of firms exploring the effects of environment and birth cohort on firm survival in sweden this paper investigates the death of firms and seizes a long term perspective it investigates the life spans of nearly 2 200 firms in seven birth cohorts of swedish joint stock companies founded during seven separate years between 1899 and 1950 research has traditionally emphasized individual and micro oriented factors in explaining post entry performance or has often focused on the influence of firm specific structural factors firm age and size a less attended field recognizes environmental forces this paper focuses on the interaction between the micro and macro levels and combines structural and environmental factors employing a cohort approach it relates firm survival to firm age and size as well as to the effect of cohort affiliation and environmental change over time period effects during macroeconomic expansion the risk of death decreases cohort effects are also evident firms founded during times of economic crisis exhibit lower survival rates consequently cohort affiliation and environmental forces i e period effects can explain differences in death rates in different firm populations

international competitiveness technical change and the state the machine tool industry in taiwan and japan abstract it is widely accepted that the growth performance of japan and the asian newly industrialized countries hong kong singapore south korea and taiwan is partly the result of the international competitiveness they have achieved in a number of export industries it remains however to explain how this competitiveness was achieved in the first part of the paper an attempt at such an explanation based on the theory of comparative advantage is critically examined it is argued that while this explanation does have some explanatory power it does not deal adequately with a the role of technical and productivity change b the causal mechanisms underlying economic growth and c the role of the state the rest of the paper examines the case of machine tools in taiwan and japan showing the importance of these three factors as well as a number of others as determinants of international competitiveness the paper ends with a discussion of policy dilemmas relating to international competitiveness in the taiwanese machine toot industry

redefining business success distinguishing between closure and failure new firms are believed to have high closure rates and these closures are believed to be failures but two u s census bureau data sources illustrate that these assumptions may not be justified the business information tracking series bits showed that about half of new employer firms survive beyond four years and the characteristics of business owners cbo showed that about a third of closed businesses were successful at closure the cbo also made it possible to compare results of models of business survival and business success but because of non response bias logit models were used similar to previous studies firms having more resources that were larger with better financing and having employees were found to have better chances of survival factors that were characteristic of closure such as having no start up capital and having a relatively young owner were also common in businesses considered successful at closure hence few defining factors can be isolated leading to true failures the significant proportion of businesses that closed while successful calls into question the use of business closure as a meaningful measure of business outcome it appears that many owners may have executed a planned exit strategy closed a business without excess debt sold a viable business or retired from the work force it is also worth noting that such inborn factors as race and gender played negligible roles in determining survivability and success at closure

collective efficiency growth path for small scale industry this study is concerned with the growth of small local industry in developing countries and explores one particular route for understanding and fostering such growth it focuses on the clustering of firms and the competitive advantage which they derive from local external economies and joint action captured in the concept of collective efficiency following a conceptual discussion the article explores the economic and institutional conditions which enhance or hinder collective efficiency this includes a case study which suggests that responding to opportunity and crisis requires shifting from mere reliance on external economies to joint action and from ascribed to earned trust

new firm survival new results using a hazard function a limitation of audretsch s 1991 study of new firm survival was the level of aggregation to industries this precluded linking establishment specific characteristics such as organizational structure and size to post entry performance the purpose of this paper is to relate the post entry performance of individual establishments not only to their technological and market structure environments but also to establishment specific characteristics we do this by estimating a hazard duration function for more than 12 000 individual establishments in u s manufacturing started in 1976 by tracking their subsequent performance over a ten year period we conclude that establishment specific characteristics which audretsch was not able to capture in his earlier study play an important role in shaping the exposure to risk confronting new establishments copyright 1995 by mit press

establishment exits in germany the role of size and age using comprehensive data for west germany this paper investigates the determinants of establishment exit we find that between 1975 and 2006 the average exit rate has risen considerably in order to test various liabilities of establishment survival identified in the literature we analyzed the impact of establishment size and put a special focus on differences between young and mature establishments our empirical analysis shows that the mortality risk falls with establishment size which confirms the liability of smallness the probability of exit is substantially higher for young establishments which are not more than 5 years old thus confirming the liability of newness there also exists a liability of aging since exit rates first decline over time reaching a minimum at ages 15 18 and then rise again somewhat the determinants of exit differ substantially between young and mature establishments suggesting that young establishments are more vulnerable in a number of ways

how do respondents process stated choice experiments attribute consideration under varying information load the popularity of stated choice sc experiments has produced many design strategies in which researchers use increasingly more complex choice settings to study choice behaviour when the amount of information to assess increases we wonder how an individual handles such information in making a choice defining the amount of information as the number of attributes associated with each choice set we investigate how this information is processed as we vary its complexity four ordered heterogeneous logit models are developed each for an sc design based on a fixed number of attributes in which the dependent variable defines the number of attributes that are ignored we find that the degree to which individuals ignore attributes is influenced by the dimensionality of the sc experiment the deviation of attribute levels from an experienced reference alternative the use of adding up attributes where feasible the number of choice sets evaluated and the personal income of the respondent the empirical evidence supports the view that individuals appear to adopt a range of coping strategies that are consistent with how they process information in real markets and that aligning choice complexity with the amount of information to process is potentially misleading relevancy is what matters copyright 2006 john wiley sons ltd

the effects of changing cost vectors on choices and scale heterogeneity choice experiments ce are widely used to estimate the values of changes in non market goods and services a cost attribute is typically included in a ce questionnaire to enable the estimation of monetary values for changes in the non market attributes presented notwithstanding the central importance of the cost attribute relatively little research has been undertaken on the impacts of varying cost attribute levels on value estimates or on individual heterogeneity in this paper i present results from mixed logit and generalised mixed logit models that account for unobserved idiosyncratic preference and scale heterogeneity respondents are found to anchor their choices on the relative cost levels presented in the survey with results suggesting that people are more sensitive to relative rather than absolute cost vectors however the higher cost levels do not lead to significantly higher value estimates partly because of observed preference heterogeneity towards the environmental attributes an important observation is that scale heterogeneity is important accounting for scale as well as preference heterogeneity in the generalised mixed logit model leads to significantly improved model fit the results indicate significant unobserved error variance across respondents unrelated to whether a high or low cost vector is used

post entry behaviour and the cycle evidence from germany abstract based on a rich database on establishments in western germany the paper aims at characterising the relationship between on the one hand growth and exit of entering cohorts and on the other hand aggregate business fluctuations a main finding is that exit is not responsive to the cycle which is at odds with views of recessions as times of cleansing where creative destruction processes occur the growth of survivors also displays little cyclical sensitivity but tends to become more responsive to aggregate business fluctuations as the cohort ages two possible explanations for this role of age on the cyclical sensitivity of surviving units are offered in the final section of the paper the first draws on the product specialisation of young and more established plants the second on the role of irreversible investment and industry selection

externalities in economies with imperfect information and incomplete markets this paper presents a simple general framework for analyzing externalities in economies with incomplete markets and imperfect infonnation by identifying the pecuniary effects of these externalities that net out the paper simplifies the problem of determining when tax interventions are pareto improving the approach indicates that such tax interventions almost always exist and that equilibria in situations of imperfect information are rarely constrained pareto optima it can also lead to simple tests based on readily observable indicators of the efficacy of particular tax policies in situations involving adverse selection signaling moral hazard incomplete contingent claims markets and queue rationing equilibria traditional discussions of externalities have emphasized the distinction between technological externalities in which the action of one individual or firm directly affects the utility or profit ofanother and pecuniary externalities in which one individual s or firm s actions affect another only through effects on prices while the presence of technological externalities imply in general that a competitive equilibrium may not be pareto efficient pecuniary externalities hy themselves are not a source of inefficiency the fact that prices change has of course important consequences there are both distributional and allocational effects but the distribution effects net out gains for example hy firms whose prices increase are precisely offset by losses e g to individuals who must pay higher prices and there are no welfare losses from the allocation effects as long as the price changes involved are small if firms are maximizing profits and individuals are maximizing utility both facing prices that correctly refiect opportunity costs then standard envelope theorem arguments imply that changes in profits or utility induced by changes in allocations resulting from any small change in prices are negligible

how people respond to contingent valuation questions a verbal protocol analysis of willingness to pay for an environmental regulation abstract this paper investigates what a respondent is thinking when answering a willingness to pay question in a contingent valuation using a think aloud technique from psychology called verbal protocol analysis the willingness to pay responses we observed seem to be constructed from a variety of considerations including an obligation to pay a fair share of the cost of the solution and signaling concern for a larger set of environmental issues the finding that respondents seem to construct their values at the time they are asked rather than reporting a more well defined value is seen as consistent with over two decades of research on the psychology of decision making potential uses of verbal protocols in contingent valuation studies are also discussed

willingness to pay for emissions reduction application of choice modeling under uncertainty and different management options abstract this paper presents the results of a choice modeling survey of households in queensland australia to assess values for reductions in national greenhouse emissions by 2020 the study is novel in two main ways first labeled alternatives were used to assess whether the types of management options for reducing net emissions green power energy efficient technologies or carbon capture are significant in understanding preferences for reducing emissions second the importance of the level and type of uncertainty involved in reductions is tested the types of uncertainty include 1 the uncertainty of achieving emissions reduction and 2 the uncertainty of international participation as the percentage of total global emissions covered by international agreements the results of this survey identified how choice responses vary when the level of uncertainty associated with emissions reduction options is included within choice alternatives

the exchange rate and company failure in a macro micro model of the uk company sector a macro micro model is presented which is used to predict company failure it bridges the gap between previous macroeconomic models and the microeconomic approach to company failure in the finance literature it can trace the probable effects of exogenous macroeconomic shocks upon the finances and the viability of individual members of the company sector a series of simulation exercises using this model quantifies the impact of variations in the exchange rate upon the failure rate among the top one hundred u k companies this impact is shown to be substantial asymmetric and at times nonlinear copyright 1991 by royal economic society

directional heterogeneity in wtp models for environmental valuation many studies in the stated preference literature on environmental valuation do not include the effects of substitutes and distance in willingness to pay wtp models in spite of the relevance of these effects in aggregation and benefit transfer heterogeneity in the availability of substitutes over space may cause multidirectional distance effects in wtp as a result disregarding this spatial heterogeneity may lead to biased estimators of the distance effect and associated wtp values cameron 2006 in this paper we demonstrate that distance decay is subject to significant directional effects which tend to be related to differences in the availability of substitutes across the study area we apply a straightforward methodology to account for such spatial heterogeneity in choice experiments and assess the effect on wtp for improvements in ecosystem services in a lake district we model distance decay effects whilst controlling for heterogeneity between users and non users and non use related wtp reasons the directional effects result in significantly different wtp estimates different market sizes reflecting the population with positive wtp and differences in total wtp up to 32

choke price bias in choice experiments this paper reports on the results from a split sample choice experiment where the effect of changing the maximum level of the cost attribute is investigated the hypothesis was that changing the maximum price level would either give rise to an income effect or have no effect on consumers preferences this was tested in the framework of a valuation study of different quality characteristics of minced pork the data was analysed using a mixed logit error component model which accounts for correlation in the unobserved part of the utility results suggest that the size of the maximum price level does matter and that changing the maximum price level has a statistically significant effect on both the general preferences structure and the wtp estimates hence researchers should be very careful when defining not only the range of the price attribute but also the maximum level of the price attribute

incorporating outcome uncertainty and prior outcome beliefs in stated preferences stated preference studies tell respondents that policies create environmental changes with varying levels of uncertainty however respondents may include their own a priori assessments of uncertainty when making choices among policy options using a choice experiment eliciting respondents preferences for conservation policies under climate change we find that higher outcome uncertainty reduces utility when accounting for endogeneity we find that prior beliefs play a significant role in this cost of uncertainty thus merely stating objective levels of outcome uncertainty will not necessarily solve the problem of people valuing something differently from originally intended respondents prior beliefs must be accounted for

the life history of cohorts of exits from german manufacturing an investigation of the life history of three cohorts of exits based on longitudinal data covering the population of all manufacturing firms in a german federal state reveals three empirical regularities 1 although the probability of exit tends to decline with age ceteris paribus only about a quarter of all exits is from the group of young firms aged five years or less 2 only a minor fraction of exits lived through a period of continous decline of employment for five years or more before closing down 3 the impact effect of job loss due to exits can differ sharply from the long run effect

lingering illness or sudden death pre exit employment developments in german establishments using a large administrative data set for germany this article compares employment developments in exiting and surviving establishments applying a matching approach we find a clear shadow of death effect reflecting lingering illness in both west and east germany establishments shrink dramatically already several years before closure employment growth rates differ strongly between exiting and surviving establishments and this difference becomes stronger as exit approaches moreover we provide first evidence that prior to exit the workforce becomes on average more skilled more female and older in exiting compared to surviving establishments these effects are more clearly visible in west than in east germany

assessing holistic economic value for multifunctional agriculture in the us abstract this study used contingent valuation method to shed light on public preferences on the multifunctional roles of the us agriculture and to present a holistic estimate of the economic value of the nonmarket goods and services of us agriculture contingent valuation survey instrument was administered to a sample composed from the ipsos web based panel fishbein s model of reasoned behavior and mediation hypothesis were combined to model the relationship between wtp behavioral intentions and sets of explanatory variables including attitudes perceived attributes about family farms farmland preservation programs government involvement in agricultural markets and ecological state of our world and socio demographic profiles results show that while exerting a highly significant impact on wtp attitudes mediate the effects of the attribute variables on wtp i e the attributes influence wtp directly as well as indirectly through attitudes the estimated mean wtp was 515 per taxpayer annually aggregating individual wtps across the us taxpayers above 20 years old produces 105 billion representing a crude estimate of the economic value that the us consumers place on the multifunctional roles of us agriculture

controlling for the effects of information in a public goods discrete choice model this paper develops a reduced form method of controlling for differences in information sets of subjects in public good discrete choice models using stated preference data the main contribution of our method comes from accounting for the effect of information provided during a survey on the mean and the variance of individual specific scale parameters in this way we incorporate both scale heterogeneity as well as observed and unobserved preference heterogeneity to investigate differences across and within information treatments our approach will also be useful to researchers who want to combine stated preference data sets while controlling for scale differences we illustrate our approach using the data from a discrete choice experiment study of a biodiversity conservation program and find that the mean of individual specific scale parameters and its variance in the sample is sensitive to the information set provided to the respondents

designing choice sets for stated preference methods the effects of complexity on choice consistency abstract we vary the complexity of choice sets used in stated preference methods to evaluate the impact on choice consistency we define five measures of complexity that capture either the amount of information or the correlational structure of information in a choice set using these measures as randomly assigned treatments in a large experiment we analyze the consistency of respondents choices using a heteroskedastic multinomial logit model we find that i all of our measures of choice set complexity affect choice consistency ii changes in the correlational structure of information have the largest impact on choice consistency and iii choice complexity significantly distorts welfare estimates our results confirm economists initial worry that moving from contingent valuation to conjoint methods will increase complexity induced choice inconsistency however our analysis also shows that these negative impacts may be mitigated if precautions are taken at the design and estimation stages of stated preference methods

contingent valuation and the budget constraint abstract one of the most vehemently debated techniques for the valuation of environmental goods is the contingent valuation method critics of this method question its validity and reliability in many respects however at the moment the contingent valuation method is the only technique at hand for the assessment of non use values of environmental goods therefore it seems worthwhile to have a closer look at some of the criticism raised in this debate this paper deals with the so called budget constraint bias which is suspected of distorting the results of contingent valuation studies according to the critics of the contingent valuation method the stated willingness to pay for an environmental good as assessed by contingent valuation studies is systematically biased upwards because participants of such surveys do not properly observe their personal budget constraints it is maintained that respondents when asked about their willingness to pay for an environmental good do not regard the amount stated by them as reducing their budget left for the purchase of private goods in this paper it is shown that from a theoretical point of view respondents intuitively do the right thing when ignoring the seeming relationship between their willingness to pay for an environmental good and their capacity to buy private goods it is elucidated that contingent valuation surveys should focus on the assessment of the shadow price of an environmental good rather than of the respective willingness to pay therefore it seems that the budget constraint bias is meaningless with respect to the validity of the contingent valuation method

the post entry performance of new small firms in german manufacturing industries while recent years have witnessed a growing interest in research on market entry by new firms evidence regarding their postentry performance is scarce this paper uses longitudinal data for small firms that entered german manufacturing industries between 1979 and 1982 and monitors their performance until 1990 entrants face a high risk of failure hazard rates tend to increase during the first years and to decrease afterwards decline of employment in a cohort due to exits and shrinking firms is compensated by growing survivors no clear cut nexus between start up size and probability of survival shows up copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

how significant are externalities for development if one man starts a new idea it is taken up by others and combined with suggestions of their own and thus it becomes the source of further new ideas and presently subsidiary trades grow up in the neighbourhood supplying it with implements and materials marshall 1920 p 225

the survival of new plants start up conditions and post entry evolution abstract this paper examines the longevity of entrants we find size to be an important determinant of the chances of survival this being particularly relevant to de novo entrants as compared with entry by established firms current size is also found to be a better predictor of failure than initial size moreover our findings indicate that after controlling for size differences past growth matters for survival suggesting a partial adjustment process for firm size in the post entry period finally new plants are more likely to live longer if they enter growing industries or industries with little entry activity

commodity specification and the framing of contingent valuation questions contingent valuation studies comprise a process of information transfer a researcher through a survey instrument conveys information about the item being valued and repondents in turn provide information about the value they place on this item considering contingent valuation from this perspective nearly all of the research evaluating the validity of this valuation method is in a general sense focused on examining the effects of information structures on value estimates a comparison of various questioning techniques represents such an examination boyle and bishop 1988 randall hoehn and tolley 1981 smith desvousges and fisher 1986 on a more specific level the selection of a payment vehicle also forms part of the information set and may affect statements of value greenley walsh and young 1982 1985 mitchell and carson 1985 these examples suggest that the validity of estimated contingent values relies heavily on the information conveyed to survey respondents since varying information structures can affect the magnitude of estimated values

firm level knowledge accumulation and regional dynamics two bodies of literature have contributed significantly to our insight into the forces driving competitiveness and economic growth regional agglomeration studies emphasise the favourable impact of geographical proximity on regional economic performance particularly through knowledge spillovers however the firms that constitute those agglomerations largely remain black boxes in contrast studies dealing with technological learning explain economic performance at firm level without systematically taking account of the effects of geographical proximity the aim of the paper is to propose a possible way to bridge this gap this contributes to our understanding of the determinants of economic growth in industrial clusters an empirical illustration of a capital goods cluster is elaborated

valuing environmental policy options a case study comparison of multiattribute and contingent valuation survey methods this paper describes a promising new evaluation approach called a value integration survey that uses the objectives and tradeoffs expressed by participants to value environmental policy options this constructive technique which builds on the interactive elicitation process of decision analysts assists stakeholders in clarifying their values and in agreeing on a policy alternative the paper compares this multi attribute valuation method to contingent valuation surveys describes the sequence of respondents tasks and presents results from a case study comparison of contingent valuation and value integration survey methods in the context of valuing options for fire control in oregon s oldgrowth forests

framing decisions in uncertain scenarios an analysis of tourist preferences in the face of global warming abstract this paper presents the results of a choice experiment survey of tourists in mallorca spain to elicit preferences for designed policies aimed at addressing the attractiveness losses of the destination in the face of global warming the study is novel in two main ways first it introduces the uncertainty deriving from the stochastic nature of global warming not as a policy attribute but as an inherent feature of the valuation scenario for this reason the expected temperature change and its probability of occurrence were kept constant across alternatives but not across different choice tasks second it measures the willingness to pay for a set of pro environmental policies under different framings results show that the inclusion of uncertainty shapes individuals decisions

economic reform in developing countries some conceptual issues abstract this paper is an effort to show that the outcome of stabilization and structural adjustment policies largely based on the neoclassical economic rationale was justifiable neither in terms of the analytical nor the historical literature the very ideological nature and the inherent contradictions of policies inhibited successful implementation and accentuated poverty and inequity in developing countries by drawing on the views of various contemporary schools of economic thought the paper also questions the validity of the international financial institutions claims of consensus on development policy the paper emphasizes that in social science research and more so in policy prescriptions the search for consensus may in fact be futile

small business failure and external risk factors unlike much of the previous literature which has generally focused on internal risk factors this study seeks to explore the impact of macro economic factors on small business mortality the results suggest that economic factors appear to be associated with between 30 and 50 of small business failures depending on the definition of failure used as expected failure rates were positively associated with interest rates where failure was defined as bankruptcy and the rate of unemployment where failure was defined as discontinuance of ownership however somewhat unexpectedly failure rates were found to be positively associated with lagged employment rates where failure was defined as to prevent further losses and with current and lagged retail sales where failure was defined as either failed to make a go of it discontinuance of ownership or discontinuance of business this indicates that a strengthening economy may provide the trigger for an increase in voluntary business exits as individual proprietors seek to maximize the returns available to them on both their financial and human capital

a comparison of stated preference methods for environmental valuation this paper presents an empirical comparison of contingent valuation cvm and choice experiments which are used to value environmental quality changes both of these methods require individuals to state their preferences for environmental qualities however choice experiments differ from cvm in that environmental attributes are varied in an experimental design which requires respondents to make repeated choices between bundles of attributes the empirical application involved the effect of environmental quality changes arising from forest management practices on recreational moose hunting values significant differences were found between the values derived from the two methods however detailed examination of the implied choice behaviour suggested that respondents ignored substitute recreation areas in the cvm question restricting the choice experiment model to consider only the one site where quality was varied resulted in welfare estimates similar to the cvm model this highlights the importance of substitutes in environmental valuation and suggests that choice experiments may be more appropriate than cvm in some cases