Estimating Tourist Externalities on Residents: A Choice Modeling Approach to the Case of Rimini

During their holidays, tourists produce direct and indirect effects on local residents, which can either be positive or negative. In this paper we investigate how residents of Rimini, a popular Italian seaside resort hosting more than ten million national and foreign overnight stays every year, internalise such effects. We use a stated preference approach and, in particular, a discrete choice modelling technique; within this framework, we are able to test some conjectures about residents’ welfare, by measuring their willingness to pay for alternative scenarios regarding the use of the territory. Tourist policies and public investments in the destination affect residents’ welfare, and our results might suggest areas of potential synergies and trade-off, leading to important policy implications.Tourism, External Effects, Discrete Choice Modelling

A Natural Experiment on Sick Pay Cuts, Sickness Absence, and Labor Costs

This study estimates the reform effects of a reduction in statutory sick pay levels on various outcome dimensions. A federal law reduced the legal obligation of German employers to provide 100 percent continued wages for up to six weeks per sickness episode to 80 percent. This measure increased the ratio of employees having no days of absence by about 7.5 percent. The mean number of absence days per year decreased by about 5 percent. The reform might have reduced total labor costs by about EUR1.5 billion per year which might have led to the creation of around 50,000 new jobs.

DEFINING AND ESTIMATING UNDERGROUND AND INFORMAL ECONOMIES: THE NEW INSTITIONAL ECONOMICS APPROACH

A taxonomy of underground economies is elaborated based on the new institutional approach to economic development. Members of formal sectors confront different sets of transformation and transaction costs than do members of informal sectors and these differences are regarded as crucial to the development process. The paper distinguishes illegal, unreported, unrecorded and informal economies and examines the conceptual and empirical linkages among them. Alternative micro and macro methodologies for measuring underground activities are reviewed and evaluated including census and survey procedures, discrepancies and monetary methods. To be published in World Development, Vol 18, No 7, 1990.Underground, unrecorded, unreported, informal, illegal, unobserved, hidden, shadow economy, transaction costs, monetary methods.

Mapping Mangrove Extent and Change: A Globally Applicable Approach

This study demonstrates a globally applicable method for monitoring mangrove forest extent at high spatial resolution. A 2010 mangrove baseline was classified for 16 study areas using a combination of ALOS PALSAR and Landsat composite imagery within a random forests classifier. A novel map-to-image change method was used to detect annual and decadal changes in extent using ALOS PALSAR/JERS-1 imagery. The map-to-image method presented makes fewer assumptions of the data than existing methods, is less sensitive to variation between scenes due to environmental factors (e.g., tide or soil moisture) and is able to automatically identify a change threshold. Change maps were derived from the 2010 baseline to 1996 using JERS-1 SAR and to 2007, 2008 and 2009 using ALOS PALSAR. This study demonstrated results for 16 known hotspots of mangrove change distributed globally, with a total mangrove area of 2,529,760 ha. The method was demonstrated to have accuracies consistently in excess of 90% (overall accuracy: 92.293.3%, kappa: 0.86) for mapping baseline extent. The accuracies of the change maps were more variable and were dependent upon the time period between images and number of change features. Total change from 1996 to 2010 was 204,850 ha (127,990 ha gain, 76,860 ha loss), with the highest gains observed in French Guiana (15,570 ha) and the highest losses observed in East Kalimantan, Indonesia (23,003 ha). Changes in mangrove extent were the consequence of both natural and anthropogenic drivers, yielding net increases or decreases in extent dependent upon the study site. These updated maps are of importance to the mangrove research community, particularly as the continual updating of the baseline with currently available and anticipated spaceborne sensors. It is recommended that mangrove baselines are updated on at least a 5-year interval to suit the requirements of policy makers

Computer-aided boundary delineation of agricultural lands

The National Agricultural Statistics Service of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) presently uses labor-intensive aerial photographic interpretation techniques to divide large geographical areas into manageable-sized units for estimating domestic crop and livestock production. Prototype software, the computer-aided stratification (CAS) system, was developed to automate the procedure, and currently runs on a Sun-based image processing system. With a background display of LANDSAT Thematic Mapper and United States Geological Survey Digital Line Graph data, the operator uses a cursor to delineate agricultural areas, called sampling units, which are assigned to strata of land-use and land-cover types. The resultant stratified sampling units are used as input into subsequent USDA sampling procedures. As a test, three counties in Missouri were chosen for application of the CAS procedures. Subsequent analysis indicates that CAS was five times faster in creating sampling units than the manual techniques were

Spatial dimensions of biodiversity values: analyses of preference heterogeneity and conservation priorities across national landscapes

This thesis contributes to our understanding of the spatial dimension of biodiversity related values in the context of changing environment. It starts with making a case for the use economic valuation for improving decision making related to environmental change and with an overview of the main concepts and approaches for doing so (Chapter 1). The thesis highlights the need to better incorporate the spatial considerations in ecosystem assessments and the importance of robust natural science that underpins any such assessments. The thesis then provides three empirical analyses, two that employ discrete choice modelling to examine how spatial information influences preferences for environmental change, and one that focuses on modelling the biodiversity impacts of land use change. The contributions of the thesis are as follows. 1) development of a novel methodology for choice experiments that incorporates space in the survey design, experimental design and presentation of choice situations on individualised maps (Chapter 3); 2) application of this methodology to test how addition of individualised maps alongside commonly used Tabular format impacts on preferences and welfare values for environmental change (Chapter 3); 3) provision of evidence that state and country borders have an impact on preferences for the portrayed changes (Chapter 2 and 3); and 4) development of prediction models that allow evaluating land use change impacts on farmland bird species; this includes assessment of model performance and variables importance for future integration of the models with economic analyses (Chapter 4). The thesis closes with research implications and personal research plans

Food Price Changes and Consumer Welfare in Ghana in the 1990s

In this paper, we analyse the effect of food price changes on household consumption in Ghana during the 1990s and assess the extent to which changes can be explained by trade and agricultural policy reforms. The measurement of the total household welfare effect, one that jointly considers (static) first order effects as well as (dynamic) consumption responses, is the object of this study. Food consumption behaviour in Ghana is analyzed by estimating a complete food demand system using the linear approximate version of the AIDS model with household survey data for 1991/92 and 1998/99. The estimated price elasticities are then utilized to evaluate the distributional impacts of the relative food price changes in terms of compensating variation. The results indicate that the distributional burden of higher food prices fell mainly on the urban poor. While it is difficult to attribute the price changes and by implication the welfare losses, to any particular policy per se, a simulation analysis indicates that trade liberalisation may not have been responsible for the welfare losses. Our simulation exercise suggests that further tariff liberalisation would tend to offset the welfare losses for all households although it is the poor and rural consumers who stand to gain the most.Food prices, Demand analysis, Consumer behaviour, Welfare, Ghana

Selection, Investment, and Women's Relative Wages Since 1975

In theory, growing wage inequality within gender should cause women to invest more in their market productivity and should differentially pull able women into the workforce, thereby closing the measured gender gap even though women's wages might have grown less than men's had their behavior been held constant. Using the CPS repeated cross-sections between 1975 and 2001, we use control function (Heckit) methods to correct married women's conditional mean wages for selectivity and investment biases. Our estimates suggest that selection of women into the labor market has changed sign, from negative to positive, or at least that positive selectivity bias has come to overwhelm investment bias. The estimates also explain why measured women's relative wage growth coincided with growth of wage inequality within-gender, and attribute the measured gender wage gap closure to changing selectivity and investment biases, rather than relative increases in women's earning potential. Using PSID waves 1975-93 to control for the changing female workforce with person-fixed effects, we also find little growth in women's mean log wages. Finally, we make a first attempt to gauge the relative importance of selection versus investment biases, by examining the family and cognitive backgrounds of members of the female workforce. PSID, NLS, and NLSY data sets show how the cross-section correlation between female employment and family/cognitive background has changed from "negative" to "positive" over the last thirty years, in amounts that might be large enough to attribute most of women's relative wage growth to changing selectivity bias.

Building the Minimum Wage: Germany's First Sectoral Minimum Wage and Its Impact on Wages in the Construction Industry

The very first minimum wage in Germany was introduced in 1997 for blue-collar workers in sub-sectors of the construction industry. In the setting of a natural experiment blue-collar workers in neighboring 4-digit-industries and white-collar workers are used as control groups for differences-in-differences-in-differences estimation based on linked employer-employee data. Estimation results reveal a sizable positive average impact on wages in East Germany and no effect in West Germany. Size and significance of effects are not homogeneous across wage regimes (individual vs. collective contracts) and across the distribution suggesting spillover effects to wages where the minimum is not binding.Minimum wage, construction sector, linked employer-employee data, differences-in-differences-in-differences, unconditional quantile regression