Valuing recreational water clarity and quality: evidence from hedonic pricing models of lakeshore properties

This study extends the economics literature on the relationship between recreational water quality and residential property pricing by separately testing the relationships between both water clarity and quality and the price of lakeshore residential properties in Ontario, Canada. Our econometric approach includes objective measures of both attributes: Secchi disk readings for water clarity and phosphorus concentrations for water quality. Econometric results presented in this study suggest that a one-metre improvement in water clarity results in an 8 per cent residential property price premium, while a one standard deviation improvement in water quality boosts lakeshore residence prices by 32 per cent.     

Local and global spatial effects in hierarchical models

Hierarchical models have a long history in empirical applications; recognition of the fact that many datasets of interest to applied econometricians are nested; counties within states, pupils within school, regions within countries, etc. Just as many datasets are characterized by nesting, many are also characterized by the presence of spatial dependence or spatial heterogeneity. Significant advances have been made in developing econometric techniques and models to allow applied econometricians to address this spatial dimension to their data. This article fuses these two literatures together and combines a hierarchical model with the two general spatial econometric models.     

The long-run effects of the real exchange rate on employment and wages in Canadian manufacturing

ABSTRACT

The literature on real exchange rate effects on the labour market is dominated by short-run analysis showing that there is heterogeneity in the responses of firms or industries to a real exchange rate shock. Analysing data on Canadian manufacturing industries, I conclude that there is a common long-run equilibrium across all manufacturing industries controlling for their openness to trade after varying adjustments to a real exchange rate shock have taken place. This conclusion is important from the perspective of policy making because it helps to form expectations about the effects of a real exchange rate movement on the labour market. The results suggest that real appreciation leads to economically significant reductions in employment in manufacturing in the long run. Real wages decrease in industries that are highly engaged in international trade and somewhat increase in industries that are relatively closed to international trade. Both employment and real wages converge quickly to the long-run equilibrium.     

The value of health benefits from ambient air quality improvements in Central and Eastern Europe: An exercise in benefits transfer

This study is an initial effort to estimate one important category of benefits of environmental improvements in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), those related to the effects of air pollution on human health. Our estimates are derived from data on ambient air quality in selected CEE locations, together with a model that links these ambient conditions to physical impacts on health and attaches economic values (in dollar terms) to these impacts. Given data limitations, our focus here is on three pollutants: particulates (PM), sulfur dioxide (SO₂), and lead (Pb). Our data set includes ambient concentrations for these pollutants in four CEE countries: Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine.Given the ambient data, dose-response functions taken from the clinical and epidemiological literature in the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe are used to generate estimates of the change in physical effects. These effects then are given an economic value by applying two approaches for scaling unit valuation figures applicable to the U.S. A Monte Carlo model is constructed to propagate the uncertainties of the dose-response functions and unit values to obtain confidence intervals on the total benefits from pollutant reductions in each country. We examine scenarios where the CEE countries improve ambient conditions for the pollutants in question to meet European Community (EC) standards and then compare these scenarios to ones involving uniform percentage ambient reductions across locations in each country.