Valuing a Natura 2000 network site to inform land use options using a discrete choice experiment: An illustration from the Basque Country

One of the main problems that public institutions face in the management of protected areas, such as the European Natura 2000 network, is determining how to design and implement sustainable management plans that account for the wide range of marketed and non-marketed benefits they provide to society. This paper presents an application of a stated preference valuation approach aimed at evaluating the social preferences of the population of the Basque Country, Spain, for the key attributes of a regional Natura 2000 network site. According to our results, individuals’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) is higher for attributes associated with non-use values (native tree species and biodiversity conservation) than for attributes associated with use values (agricultural development and commercial forestry). The paper concludes that management policies related to Natura 2000 network sites should account for both for the importance of non-use values and the heterogeneity of the population's preferences in order to minimize potential land use conflicts.     

Free admission to museums and monuments: an exploration of some perceptions of the audiences

• This paper considers the theme of the audiences' perceptions of free admission in national French museums and monuments. The results show that, from an individual perspective, perceptions of free admission are linked to perceptions of price, money and payment, hence complementing perceptions expressed in a collective perspective (a symbolic, political measure causing either adhesion or rejection). These perspectives are generally put forward by both advocates and opponents of the measure in their discussions. These different visions of free admission have managerial implications for managers of museums and monuments.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Household resilience to adverse macroeconomic shocks: evidence from Czech microdata

We develop a methodology for identifying financially distressed households and use it for testing the responses to shocks to the unemployment rate, the interest rate and prices of essential expenditure in the Czech Republic. We extend the approach of Johansson and Persson (2006) for Sweden and Albacete and Fessler (2010) for Austria in the literature to allow for full labour market transitions between employment and unemployment, and, due to data availability, to account for heads and spouses within households. This improvement may lead to a higher response of household distress incidence, due to the unemployment rate shock, than in both Sweden and Austria, while the effects due to the interest rate shock are of similar size as in Austria. We illustrate the use of our approach for stress testing households’ ability to pay their debts using macroeconomic scenarios from the CNB’s official forecast and from the CNB’s Financial Stability Report. The results highlight the importance of using micro-level datasets in the analysis of household distress incidence, as the impact of shocks is more pronounced among lower-income households.     

Why do global long‐term scenarios for agriculture differ? An overview of the AgMIP Global Economic Model Intercomparison

Recent studies assessing plausible futures for agricultural markets and global food security have had contradictory outcomes. To advance our understanding of the sources of the differences, 10 global economic models that produce long‐term scenarios were asked to compare a reference scenario with alternate socioeconomic, climate change, and bioenergy scenarios using a common set of key drivers. Several key conclusions emerge from this exercise: First, for a comparison of scenario results to be meaningful, a careful analysis of the interpretation of the relevant model variables is essential. For instance, the use of “real world commodity prices” differs widely across models, and comparing the prices without accounting for their different meanings can lead to misleading results. Second, results suggest that, once some key assumptions are harmonized, the variability in general trends across models declines but remains important. For example, given the common assumptions of the reference scenario, models show average annual rates of changes of real global producer prices for agricultural products on average ranging between ?0.4% and +0.7% between the 2005 base year and 2050. This compares to an average decline of real agricultural prices of 4% p.a. between the 1960s and the 2000s. Several other common trends are shown, for example, relating to key global growth areas for agricultural production and consumption. Third, differences in basic model parameters such as income and price elasticities, sometimes hidden in the way market behavior is modeled, result in significant differences in the details. Fourth, the analysis shows that agro‐economic modelers aiming to inform the agricultural and development policy debate require better data and analysis on both economic behavior and biophysical drivers. More interdisciplinary modeling efforts are required to cross‐fertilize analyses at different scales.     

Applying evaluation criteria for the land consolidation effect to three contrasting study areas in the Czech Republic

Land consolidation (LC) is a tool for improving the effectiveness of land cultivation and for supporting rural development. In the Czech Republic it is, in addition, used to remedy the damages and wrongs caused by 40 years of suppression of land ownership. This paper investigates the specific conditions and various outcomes of LC in three study areas, focusing on the evaluation criteria of land ownership and plot arrangement before and after LC. The three study areas contain contrasting observed features, and they therefore provide a good illustration of a whole range of factors that can affect the rate of LC. The author designed LC projects in each of the study areas between 1994 and 2003, and defined two sets of criteria for ex ante and ex post evaluation based on size, shape and juxtaposition of the plots, on the natural and social conditions, and on the economic benefits and advantages of LC for the landowners. The relationship between the ex ante criteria and the three LC indicators was analyzed using a multiple regression approach. The results show that the initial conditions had a strong effect on the outcomes of the LC programmes. Defining the criteria and the models for the Czech Republic will help to improve the methodological principles underlying LC projects, and it will also support the decision-making processes of the LC authorities in order to optimize the allocation of limited funds.     

DO MANAGERS MATTER: EVIDENCE FROM E‐SPORTS

Growing importance of human resources places the role of managers at the core of company efficiency. However, there are studies that demonstrate the efficiency of teams without a manager, so‐called self‐managed teams, is higher comparing with managed teams. Thus, despite the focus on managerial efficiency in the economic literature, the issue of whether a team needs a manager is far from settled. In this paper, we use a quasi‐experimental setting from e‐Sports (competitive video gaming) to understand whether the hiring a manager is of benefit to team performance. The empirical part of the study is based on endogenous switching regression model. This method allows investigating what performance of self‐managed team would be if it will have a manager and vice versa. The dataset includes the information of prize money and features of top e‐Sports teams in Counter‐Strike: Global Offensive (e‐Sports discipline) from 2013 to 2017. The main finding of this study is that managed teams perform better than self‐managed ones but this is not due to the manager. (JEL Z2, M54, L25)     

Do house prices reflect fundamentals? Aggregate and panel data evidence

We investigate whether recently high and consequently rapidly decreasing U.S. house prices have been justified by fundamental factors such as personal income, population, house rent, stock market wealth, building costs, and mortgage rate. We first conduct the standard unit root and cointegration tests with aggregate data. Nationwide analysis potentially suffers from problems of the low power of stationarity tests and the ignorance of dependence among regional house markets. Therefore, we also employ panel data stationarity tests which are robust to cross-sectional dependence. Contrary to previous panel studies of the U.S. housing market, we consider several, not just one, fundamental factors. Our results confirm that panel data unit root tests have greater power as compared with univariate tests. However, the overall conclusions are the same for both methodologies. The house price does not align with the fundamentals in sub-samples prior to 1996 and from 1997 to 2006. It appears that the real estate prices take long swings from their fundamental value and it can take decades before they revert to it. The most recent correction (a collapsed bubble) occurred around 2006.     

Did rent deregulation alter tenure choice decisions in the Czech Republic?

Our study is the first that explicitly links rent deregulation and the choice between owning and renting (the tenure choice) using household decisions over a 1‐year period. The rent deregulation process in the Czech Republic started in 2006, two years after joining the European Union. By design, the maximum regulated rent appreciation depended explicitly on real estate prices, which accelerated the pace of deregulation due to rapidly rising prices at the time. A unique dataset enables us to track the tenure choice of households from consumption surveys for subsequent years. The proportion of households that switched from renting to owning sharply increased among renters of regulated apartments. We show that this change was caused by the deregulation process. In contrast, rent deregulation makes owners and renters paying market rent less likely to change ownership status.