REDD+ Policy Preferences in Ethiopia: Developing Controls for Attribute Non-Attendance in Choice Experiment Data

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is a payment for ecosystem services system created under the UN to reduce deforestation and degradation in developing countries. The REDD+ program creates markets for carbon sequestration services where REDD+ buyers are in UN-FCCC Annex 1 countries (developed countries) and sellers are in non-Annex 1 (typically developing countries). About 25% of the world’s forests are community managed (three times as much as private forests) but there is limited knowledge and information on preferences of households in communities with community managed forests toward programs like REDD+. Further, we do not have a good understanding of the true costs borne by these households when participating in programs like REDD+. We use a choice experiment survey of rural Ethiopian communities to understand respondents’ preferences toward the institutional structure of REDD+ contracts. Choice experiment surveys, a non-market valuation technique, allow the researcher to elicit preferences, including the tradeoffs between characteristics of the good or policy being studied and the marginal willingness to pay for individual characteristics of the program/good being valued. Preliminary results show that respondents care about how REDD+ programs are structured with regard to the manner in which the payments are divided between the households and the communities, the restrictions on using grazing land, and the level of payments received for the program. We find that the required firewood gathering reduction does not impact some households’ choice of REDD+ contracts. We are currently testing new methods in attribute non-attendance to better explain this finding

Land Value Tax Analysis: Simulating the Tax in Multnomah County

This report, produced with support from Common Ground OR-WA, examines the impacts of a land value tax system in Multnomah County through a two-step modeling process that first eliminates the tax policy that has caused market assessed value and real market value to diverge, and subsequently simulates a split-rate tax on a) land value and b) improvement value. The report is accopanied by a technical summary document

Healthcare Spending Mandate Modeling Report

Governor Brown’s health care financing package, which was released with the 2019-21 recommended budget included several revenue components which provide broad-based, sustainable revenue for health care coverage in Oregon for the next six years. One component of that package is the Subsidized Employer Participation Program, which would be similar to the San Francisco Health Care Security Ordinance (HCSO). The new requirement would compel employers of a certain size who otherwise do not qualify for any exemption to contribute to their employees’ health care costs. An employer’s contribution could be in one of three ways: (1) in the form of directly paying for part of their employees’ health insurance, (2) by paying for health care services directly or through a sort of health reimbursement arrangement, or (3) by contributing to the state Health Care Access Fund that further supports access to coverage through the Oregon marketplace or helps fund the Oregon Health Plan. The Oregon Health Authority (OHA) has developed a revenue model to estimate potential state collections based on the size of the mandated contribution. To assist in this, the OHA has requested that the Northwest Economic Research Center (NERC) review their revenue and rate-setting modeling for accuracy and explore additional risks and consequences of the proposed policy. The OHA model utilizes 2017 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) data to determine the number of employees by firm size and full-time/part-time status, as well as health insurance status. From this data, the model calculates the numbers of employees within three groups: employees at firms not offering coverage, employees at firms offering coverage but who are not eligible for coverage, and employees at firms offering coverage who are eligible but are not covered. The model then assumes per worker hour spending requirements assuming all workers are employed for an average of 34.5 hours per week, to calculate the potential revenue raised. For the purpose of this analysis, NERC assumes that: 1) New Businesses (startups) would be exempt from the spending requirement in their first year; 2) $120 million annually from the Health Care Access fund would be used to fund the Oregon Health Plan with the remaining revenue being directed to a new program providing marketplace subsidies to employees getting coverage through the Marketplace; and 3) only firms with over 50 employees will be subject to health care spending requirements