Spatial Complementarity of Forests and Farms: Accounting for Ecosystem Services

Our article considers the economic contributions of forest ecosystem services, using a case study from Flores, Indonesia, in which forest protection in upstream watersheds stabilize soil and hydrological flows in downstream farms. We focus on the demand for a weak complement to the ecosystem services—farm labor—and account for spatial dependence due to economic interactions, ecosystem processes, and data integration. The estimated models have theoretically expected properties across eight different specifications. We find strong evidence that forest ecosystem services provide economically substantive benefits to local people and that these services would be substantially undervalued if spatial dependence is ignored.     

Evaluating Alternative Prescribed Burning Policies to Reduce Net Economic Damages from Wildfire

We estimate a wildfire risk model with a new measure of wildfire output, intensity-weighted risk and use it in Monte Carlo simulations to estimate welfare changes from alternative prescribed burning policies. Using Volusia County, Florida as a case study, an annual prescribed burning rate of 13% of all forest lands maximizes net welfare; ignoring the effects on wildfire intensity may underestimate optimal rates of prescribed burning. Our estimated supply function for prescribed fire services is inelastic, suggesting that increasing contract prescribed fire services on public lands may produce rapidly escalating costs for private landowners and unintended distributional and "leakage" effects.     

Time to Burn: Modeling Wildland Arson as an Autoregressive Crime Function

Six Poisson autoregressive models of order p [PAR( p )] of daily wildland arson ignition counts are estimated for five locations in Florida (1994–2001). In addition, a fixed effects time-series Poisson model of annual arson counts is estimated for all Florida counties (1995–2001). PAR( p ) model estimates reveal highly significant arson ignition autocorrelation, lasting up to eleven days, in addition to seasonality and links to law enforcement, wildland management, historical fire, and weather. The annual fixed effects model replicates many findings of the daily models but also detects the influence of wages and poverty on arson, in ways expected from theory. All findings support an economic model of crime.