A CONTINGENT VALUATION STUDY OF UNCERTAIN ENVIRONMENTAL GAINS

Acid deposition in a present and future cause of biodiversity losses in vulnerable upland areas of Scotland important for nature conservation. However, the exact nature of damages under the status quo, and both the timing and extent of recovery of upland ecosystems if deposition is reduced, are subject to uncertainty. this uncertainty complicates damages cost estimation. In this paper, we have explored the use of CVM to measure the willingness to pay (WTP) of the Scottish population for uncertain recovery/damage scenarios from reduced acid rain deposition. An optimally-designed referendum format was used utilising the distribution of open-ended bids from a pilot study to determine bid amounts and sampling size for each bid amount. Eight explanatory variables, including future damage level were selected in a non-linear step-wise regression analysis. Average household WTP for abatement of acid rain was £247 and £351 per year when faced with low and high future damage levels respectively. Recovery level and recovery time did not significantly influence WTP. When faced with risky outcomes regarding future damage and recovery level, respondent were found to be risk averse to both environmental gains and losses.     

TECHNOLOGY CHOICE AND ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS IN A TRADE AND ENVIRONMENT CONTEXT*

Assuming that an environmentally‐friendly technology not only reduces pollution emissions but also strengthens the preference of consumers for goods produced with such a technology, we show that a legally stipulated choice of cleaner technologies, requiring resources and hence reducing output, can improve the welfare of the economy even when other economies do not choose such technologies, and that the driving force can be the terms‐of‐trade effect. Therefore, even a unilateral regulation on the choice of technology would be approved in the economy when the environmental awareness of consumers is sufficiently raised.     

VEHICLE CHOICE BEHAVIOR AND THE DECLINING MARKET SHARE OF U.S. AUTOMAKERS*

We develop a consumer‐level model of vehicle choice to shed light on the erosion of the U.S. automobile manufacturers' market share during the past decade. We examine the influence of vehicle attributes, brand loyalty, product line characteristics, and dealerships. We find that nearly all of the loss in market share for U.S. manufacturers can be explained by changes in basic vehicle attributes, namely: price, size, power, operating cost, transmission type, reliability, and body type. U.S. manufacturers have improved their vehicles' attributes but not as much as Japanese and European manufacturers have improved the attributes of their vehicles.     

CONTINGENT PRICES AND MONEY*

Price posting with directed search is a widely used trading mechanism. Coles and Eeckhout showed that if sellers are allowed to post prices contingent on realized demand instead of one price, then there is real market indeterminacy. In this article, we fit this contingent price‐posting protocol into a monetary economy. We show that, as long as holding money is costly, there exists a unique equilibrium rather than a continuum. In this equilibrium sellers post a low price for when the buyer is alone, a high price for when several buyers show up, and buyers randomize between sellers and money holdings.     

GENDER AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL CHOICE: THE ROLE OF SITUATED AGENCY

Amartya Sen defends a rich conception of social choice theory against tendencies to limit social choice theory to the formal investigation of rules of collective decision-making. His understanding of social choice theory makes the field a natural candidate for exploring gender issues in the evaluation of democratic policy. Not surprisingly, Sen has applied the insights he developed from his study of social choice to the evaluation of gender inequality, in particular to women's well-being in the context of the family. I focus on Sen's distinction between well-being and agency, and argue that from the perspective of women's movements and related social movements, the role of agency has so far been unduly neglected in social choice theory.     

ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS AND THE SOCIAL COST OF SMOKING

A widely prevailing assumption is that taxing and regulating smoking are justified on efficiency grounds since smokers impose a significant cost on others. Supposedly, the same economic analysis that has been used to justify taxing and regulating environmental pollution also applies to smoking. But two serious problems undermine the efficiency argument for taxation and regulation to internalize the cost of smoking. First, the largest external cost that smoking supposedly generates does not exist. Second, even if smoking does generate an external cost in the form of environmental tobacco smoke, one cannot justify either taxing or regulating smoking when one properly applies the principles of environmental economics.     

SOCIAL ACCOUNTING AND THE PUBLIC SECTOR*

This article contributes to the theory of social accounting. As such, it tries to extend earlier literature on the welfare equivalence of the comprehensive net national product in two main directions, both of which refer to the public sector. One is by considering welfare measurement problems associated with public good provision and redistributive policy, respectively, when the public revenues are raised by distortionary taxes. The other is by addressing the consequences of a “federation‐like” decision structure, where independent tax and expenditure decisions are made both by the central government and by lower level governments.     

ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH AND CHOICE OF RESIDENCE

This paper analyses the relationships between the values and dispersion of residential properties and the environmental-health quality of their locations. It constructs residents' health-adjusted lifetime-utility function by combining satisfaction from consumption over the lifespan with risk to life from living in an environmentally unhealthy location. It employs this utility function to analyse willingness to pay for environmental-health quality, choice of location and residential dispersion and its relationship with income distribution.     

SPINOFFS AND THE MARKET FOR IDEAS*

We present a theory of entry through spinoffs where workers generate ideas and possess private information concerning their quality. Because quality is privately observed, adverse selection implies that the market can only offer a price that reflects the average quality of ideas sold. Only workers with good ideas decide to spin off, whereas workers with mediocre ideas sell them. Existing firms pay a price for ideas sold in the market that implies zero expected profits. Hence, firms’ project selection is independent of firm size, which can lead to scale‐independent growth. This mechanism results in invariant firm‐size distributions that resemble the data.     

A MARKET WITH A SOCIAL CONSUMPTION EXTERNALITY*

We model a spatial market in which the utility of each consumer is affected by the consumers who buy precisely the same product. The marginal contribution of consumers x's purchase on consumer y depends on |x–y|, which declines as |x–y| increases. Such modelling of preferences fits goods that signal a consumer's place in society—clothing styles, automobiles and jewellry are examples. For 2n + 1 firms we find the unique symmetric equilibrium and derive comparative statics on the optimal number of firms, the largest number of firms the market can support, and the behaviour of profits per firm as n increases.     

河北省中心镇选择与评价

选择和培育中心镇是我国目前实施有重点地发展小城镇的重要途径。文章选取9项社会经济指标建立了河北省中心镇选择评价体系,继而借助SPSS软件应用因子分析法对全省建制镇的综合实力进行计算,求出综合实力得分,优选出全省200个中心镇;对其进行聚类分析,将其综合实力划分为4类并做出相应评价。     

用条件估值法评估九寨沟的游憩价值——CVM方法的校正与比较

自然游憩资源作为环境资源的一种,是最活跃的环境价值研究领域之一。条件估值法(CVM)是国际上用于游憩价值评估的两种经典方法之一,其评估结果受不同引导评估技术的影响。以九寨沟自然保护区为例,选择了在统计有效性方面具有相对优势的支付卡梯级法和1.5边界二分法,来评估其游憩价值。结果表明,主要由于"胖尾"偏差的影响,1.5边界二分法获得的支付意愿(WTP)要高于支付卡梯级法;在进行了偏差校正后,二者所获得的估值结果相当接近,说明本研究的内部有效性检验较为理想。研究认为即使对我国这样的发展中国家,CVM仍为一种富有前景的环境资源价值评估方法,不过必须建立在对CVM调查各个环节的精心设计、严谨实施和审慎分析的基础上。     

PRODUCTIVITY AND THE LABOR MARKET: COMOVEMENT OVER THE BUSINESS CYCLE*

The productivity‐driven Mortensen–Pissarides model predicts that labor productivity is strongly correlated with labor market variables whereas these correlations were argued to be much weaker in the data, especially since the 1980s. We first document that the size of these discrepancies between the data and the model becomes substantially smaller if employment data from the Current Population Survey is used in measuring productivity instead of the commonly used employment data from the Current Employment Statistics. Second, we show that incorporating time to build and a stochastic value of home production helps reconcile the quantitative performance of the model with the data.