This article proposes contemporary best-practice recommendations for stated preference (SP) studies used to inform decision making, grounded in the accumulated body of peer-reviewed literature. These recommendations consider the use of SP methods to estimate both use and non-use (passive-use) values, and cover the broad SP domain, including contingent valuation and discrete choice experiments. We focus on applications to public goods in the context of the environment and human health but also consider ways in which the proposed recommendations might apply to other common areas of application. The recommendations recognize that SP results may be used and reused (benefit transfers) by governmental agencies and nongovernmental organizations, and that all such applications must be considered. The intended result is a set of guidelines for SP studies that is more comprehensive than that of the original National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Blue Ribbon Panel on contingent valuation, is more germane to contemporary applications, and reflects the two decades of research since that time. We also distinguish between practices for which accumulated research is sufficient to support recommendations and those for which greater uncertainty remains. The goal of this article is to raise the quality of SP studies used to support decision making and promote research that will further enhance the practice of these studies worldwide.

This paper investigates whether rights-based management in fisheries ends the “race to fish.” The staggered introductions of catch shares in the Alaska pollock and Pacific hake fisheries—neighboring regional fisheries that are the largest and sixth largest fishery by volume in the United States, respectively—provide a unique natural experiment for isolating the impact of “catch shares.” Difference-in-difference-in-differences estimations, combined with vessel fixed effects, indicate that catch shares are associated with an increase in the number of days that a harvester spends at sea engaging in fishing activities, which implies a slowing of fishing effort, ceteris paribus. For the Pacific hake fishery, participation in the pollock fishery is a negative predictor of a harvester’s days at sea in the target fishery. In the initial two years when the hake fishery was rationalized before the pollock fishery the pollock fishery served as a derby alternative for hake harvesters. Results also show that pollock and hake harvesters respond to changing economic conditions: fish or fish product prices are positive predictors of days at sea. For the Pacific hake catcher-processor fleet, an estimated increase in days at sea per ton of catch suggests that a harvester’s fishing intensity has also slowed as a result of catch shares.

This paper examines the effect of energy production on health using a recent strike that affected oil refineries in France as a natural experiment. First, we show that the temporary reduction in refining led to a significant reduction in sulfur dioxide (SO₂) concentrations. Second, this shock significantly increased birth weight and gestational age of newborns, particularly for those exposed to the strike during the first and third trimesters of pregnancy, and decreased asthma and bronchitis admissions. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that a 1-unit (or 26%) decline in monthly SO₂ leads to an €89 million increase in lifetime earnings per birth-year cohort. This externality from oil refineries should be an important part of policy discussions surrounding the production of energy.

This paper develops a new approach for estimating willingness to pay (WTP) for public goods using referendum voting data, and we demonstrate the approach by applying it to a series of referenda in California spanning a wide array of public goods. We find a range of annual WTP values for successful propositions from $3.47 per person for children’s hospitals to $94.48 per person for transportation infrastructure and management. We also impute the per capita cost of each proposition. Comparing these imputed costs to our WTP measure allows us to infer the upper bound on prices that would still ensure passage of a successful measure. Conversely, this comparison provides an estimate of the decrease in prices that would have been necessary to ensure passage of unsuccessful propositions. In addition, we estimate the relative effects of prices, income, and ideology on the support for public goods. We show that both ideology and economic costs have significant impacts, which stands in contrast to previous work that contends that voting patterns are driven purely by fiscal costs.

This paper examines the impact of fetal exposure to air pollution on fourth-grade test scores in Santiago, Chile. We rely on comparisons across siblings which address concerns about locational sorting (for nonmovers) and all other time-invariant family characteristics that can lead to endogenous exposure to poor environmental quality. We also exploit data on air quality alerts to help address concerns related to short-run time-varying avoidance behavior, which has been shown to be important in a number of other contexts. We find a strong negative effect from fetal exposure to carbon monoxide (CO) and correlated pollutants (like PM10) on math and language skills measured in fourth grade. These effects are economically significant, and our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the 50% reduction in CO in Santiago between 1990 and 2005 increased lifetime earnings by approximately US$100 million per birth cohort.

We design a choice experiment comparing policies that reduce agricultural nutrient pollution and harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie and administer it to Ohio residents using an online survey panel. We compare two treatments that have been found to mitigate hypothetical bias, cheap talk and honesty priming, with a neutral priming control. We find greater sensitivity to price among respondents during choices made immediately following the cheap talk intervention. As additional choices are made, the “wedge” between price sensitivity in the control and honesty prime treatments diminishes and eventually loses statistical significance. We find this effect in both our online choice experiments and among respondents to face-to-face choice experiments conducted by de-Magistris, Gracia, and Nayga. Our online implementation of an honesty priming intervention yields no significant change in price sensitivity compared to a control. While de-Magistris et al. implement an honesty priming intervention that fully mitigates hypothetical bias in a face-to-face setting, we show that this effect is also transient, and in later choice exercises we cannot reject the null hypothesis of equality between honesty priming and the control. Our results are robust to multiple specifications and suggest additional work is required to adapt priming interventions for online settings and to extend the effectiveness of popular hypothetical bias mitigation techniques when respondents face multiple choice tasks.

Lead is a neurotoxin with developmentally harmful effects in children. In the United States, over half the current flow of lead into the atmosphere is attributable to lead-formulated aviation gasoline (avgas), used in a large fraction of piston-engine aircraft. Various public interest firms have petitioned the EPA to find endangerment from and regulate lead emitted by piston-engine aircraft, though the EPA has so far ruled against such petitions. To address an EPA request for more evidence, we construct a novel data set that links time and spatially referenced blood lead data from over a million children to 448 nearby airports in Michigan. Across a series of tests, and adjusting for other known sources of lead exposure, we find that child blood lead levels (1) increase dose-responsively in proximity to airports, (2) decline measurably among children sampled in the months after 9/11, (3) increase dose-responsively in the flow of piston-engine aircraft traffic, (4) increase in the percentage of prevailing wind days drifting in the direction of a child’s residential location, and (5) behave intuitively and significantly when considering two-way and three-way interactions of our main treatment variables. To quantify the policy relevance of the results we provide a conservative estimate of the social damages attributable to avgas consumption. Damages are at least $10 per gallon, which can be compared to a pump price of about $6 per gallon.

We study stabilization targets: common environmental policy recommendations that specify a maximum probability of an environmental variable exceeding a fixed target (e.g., limit climate change to at most 2°C above pre-industrial). Previous work generally considers stabilization targets under certainty equivalence. Using an integrated assessment model with uncertainty about the sensitivity of the temperature to greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations (the climate sensitivity), learning, and random weather shocks, we calculate the optimal GHG emissions policy with and without stabilization targets. We characterize the range of feasible targets and show that the climate is difficult to control in the short run, although as learning resolves the planner eventually achieves the target with a sustained reduction in emissions over time. We find that uncertainty exacerbates the welfare cost of stabilization targets. First, the targets are inflexible and do not adjust to new information about the climate system. Second, the target forces the emissions policy to overreact to transient shocks. These effects are present only in a model with uncertainty. Introduction of a stabilization target into the baseline model with uncertainty results in a welfare loss of 4.7%, which is 66% higher than the cost of introducing the target in the certainty version of the model.