GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND APPLIED ECONOMICS: AN INITIAL DISCUSSION OF POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS AND CONTRIBUTIONS

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are becoming increasingly important to virtually all of the natural and social sciences. Applied economists will find that GIS can make valuable contributions to many of the problems with which they are concerned. Moreover, a great deal of the science behind GIS technology would benefit from the contributions of applied economists. This paper presents some initial suggestions for the ways in which GIS may be important to economics and the GIS related issues concerning which applied economists could provide useful insights.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

INSTITUTIONAL AFFILIATION OF AUTHORS IN THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, 1988-1992

Opaluch and Just reported the top 20 departments in pages per faculty of articles in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics for the five year period 1968-1972. To determine how much has changed and how much has not during the intervening two decades, the analysis was repeated for the five year period 1988-1992. Some things seem not to change. University of California, Berkeley, remains at the pinnacle twenty years later. And 13 of the top 20 departments two decades ago, remain there during the 1988-1992 period. But seven did change, and the most notable aspect is that the number of Northeast departments in the top 20 rose from two to five.Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

GENDER'S ROLE IN MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTANCE: SEX IN THE JOURNAL

Women authors fare poorly at the hands of referees in some economics journals, especially when the review process is not blind. Using data on the 155 manuscripts submitted to the NJARE for publication during the period 1984-88, we found no evidence of differential referee acceptance rates for manuscripts with female and male lead authors.Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

CONJOINT ANALYSIS OF GROUNDWATER PROTECTION PROGRAMS

Three conjoint models-a traditional ratings model, a ratings difference specification, and a binary response model-were used to value groundwater protection program alternatives. The last, which is virtually identical to a dichotomous choice contingent valuation specification, produced the smallest value estimates. This suggests that the conjoint model is very sensitive to model specifications and that traditional conjoint models may overestimate economic value because many respondents are not in the market for the commodity being valued.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Local Environment Control and Institutional Crowding-out

Regulations that are designed to improve social welfare typically begin with the premise that individuals are purely self-interested. Experimental evidence shows, however, that individuals do not typically behave this way; instead, they tend to strike a balance between self and group interests. From experiments performed in rural Colombia, we found that a regulatory solution for an environmental dilemma that standard theory predicts would improve social welfare clearly did not. This occurred because individuals confronted with the regulation began to exhibit less other-regarding behavior and made choices that were more self-interested; that is, the regulation appeared to crowd out other-regarding behavior.institutional crowding-out, external regulation, local environment quality, experiments, South America, Colombia

CHOOSING ALTERNATIVES TO CONTAMINATED GROUND WATER SUPPLIES: A SEQUENTIAL DECISION FRAMEWORK UNDER UNCERTAINTY

In increasing numbers, communities that rely on groundwater for drinking supplies have discovered contamination from agricultural pesticides and herbicides, road salt, underground fuel storage, and septic systems. A variety of short- and long-run remedies are available with highly uncertain outcomes. An appropriate technique for solving a benefit-cost problem of this type is a sequential decision framework using stochastic dynamic programming procedures for solution. The approach is illustrated here by means of an application to the problem of the recent contamination of the groundwater of Whately, Massachusetts by the agricultural fumigant EDB and the pesticide aldicarb.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Economic inequality and burden-sharing in the provision of local environmental quality

A large, but inconclusive, literature addresses how economic heterogeneity affects the use of local resources and local environmental quality. One line of thought, which derives from Nash equilibrium provision of public goods, suggests that in contexts in which individual actions degrade local environmental quality, wealthier people in a community will tend to do more to protect environmental quality. In this paper we report on experiments performed in rural Colombia that were designed to explore the role that economic inequality plays in the å¢rovision-of local environmental quality. Subjects were asked to decide how much time to devote to collecting firewood from a local forest, which degrades local water quality, and how much to unrelated pursuits. Economic heterogeneity was introduced by varying the private returns to these alternative pursuits. Consistent with the Nash equilibrium prediction, we found that the players with more valuable alternative options put less pressure on local water quality. However, the subjects with less valuable alternative options showed significantly more restraint relative to their pure Nash strategies. Furthermore, they were willing to bear significantly greater opportunity costs to move their groups to outcomes that yielded higher average payoffs and better water quality than the Nash equilibrium outcome.Local environment quality, burden sharing, economic inequality, experiments

Learning, External Benefits, and Methane Generation From Agricultural Wastes

External benefits from learning by doing exist for methane generation from agricultural wastes. Under a variety of circumstances,. these external benefits exceed in magnitude the program costs necessary to induce the experience necessary to make such generation a viable activity