An Economic Valuation of Pollination Services in Georgia

The production of many crops depends on biotic pollination. As pollinator populations decline, assessments of the potential consequential loss of economic value are critical. We estimate the economic value of pollination services ($608 million), crop vulnerability ratio (21 percent), and pollination’s contribution to agricultural production value (5 percent) for Georgia.Pollination, Colony Collapse Disorder, Georgia, Bioeconomic, Value, Vulnerability, Ecosystem Services, Crops, Honeybees, Pollinators, Pollination Dependency, Environmental Economics and Policy,

Attitudes Toward Mental Illness: A Study Among Law Enforcement Officers in the South and Southwest United States

Ashley Montano Brooke Barfield The objective of the current study was to evaluate factors that may affect law enforcement officer’s attitudes toward the mentally ill. Through the use of a self-administered questionnaire officers in California, Colorado and Florida reported their perceptions of mental illness, specialized training they received, and any personal or family experiences with mental illness. Our findings suggest officers that reported having a parent who is mentally ill were more likely to have positive attitudes in comparison to officers who did not have these relationships. We also found limited support for a gender difference in attitudes towards mental illness with female officers reporting more positive attitudes. Although we did find some significant results in support of our hypotheses we believe our sample size of 93 active LEOs needs to be greatly expanded to draw solid conclusions

Recreation Survey Response Data: Patterns and Problems

Systematic biases in reporting past behavior may compromise the methods used to derive values from revealed preference data. Recreational survey response data is routinely plagued by three problems: an abundance of zeros due to non-participation (the “excess-zero” problem), response “heaping”, and “leaping” of responses (issues resulting from recall bias). To simultaneously address these issues in the discrete data context, we consider several different specifications of the negative binomial estimator of recreation demand. We find that the negative binomial model’s fit is significantly improved by reassigning heaped responses to censored regimes where reported trip numbers form the intervals’ upper-bounds. To this end, we illustrate how employing the incomplete beta function to represent the cumulative distribution function of the negative binomial distribution simplifies the incorporation of censored intervals

A Distribution Transition Method for Extreme Responses in Recreation Survey Data

Revealed preference methods require survey data on past resource use, and numerous studies have found reported recreation frequency to be overestimated and concentrated on prototype (rounded and calendar-based) values. This paper develops an approach to treat extreme values and rounded responses in survey datasets and thereby improve model fit and resulting welfare estimates. We illustrate how, when modeling single-site trip data, model fit can be improved by transitioning from a discrete to a continuous distribution at a cut-point where response behavior begins to exhibit rounding. We feel this method will be useful for recreation demand research and may have broad applicability to the general analysis of count data

An Economic Valuation of Pollination Services in Georgia

The production of many crops depends on biotic pollination. As pollinator populations decline, assessments of the potential consequential loss of economic value are critical. We estimate the economic value of pollination services ($608 million), crop vulnerability ratio (21 percent), and pollination’s contribution to agricultural production value (5 percent) for Georgia