Judd Hammack knew he couldn’t attend this year's AERE Luncheon, but Gardner Brown had planned to be here in person to accept the award. Unfortunately, he’s had a very rough couple of weeks and is therefore been unable to travel to these meetings. We are patching him into today’s celebration by speaker-phone.
Comments on the winning publication: Scott Barrett, Chair, Selection Committee
On behalf of Jay and Douglass, it is a pleasure to share our thinking in choosing this paper for the award.
This book, which is only 95 pages long, is a paragon of applied renewable resource economics. It is one of the first publications to integrate economics and ecology. The book considers not only the population dynamics of waterfowl but the relationship between population and the environment—the amount of wetlands available for breeding, something we today call an “ecosystem service.” The authors estimated non-market values, based on a mail survey questionnaire that asks hunters how much they would be willing to pay, and be willing to accept to give up their rights, to hunt waterfowl, and found that these values differed substantially.
The book also offers an optimal control model in which the harvest and habitat are chosen jointly. The authors then combine these approaches to construct a cost-benefit analysis of wetland conservation, something which is finally in vogue today. The results show that more wetlands should be conserved, with the increase in habitat supporting a greater harvest. The sign of this estimate comes as no surprise: farmers are unable to appropriate the value of their conservation, and so conserve less land than is socially optimal. But the magnitudes of the calculations are eye catching. The book’s analysis suggests that breeding habitat should increase from 50 to 500 percent.
Estimates this large, derived from a study of this sophistication, cry out for a policy response, and it is pleasing to note that Hammack and Brown’s estimates were later adopted by state and federal agencies for calculating the value of habitat purchases. Their book and the approaches taken within it still serve as a model for how to do cost-benefit analysis — it is theoretically rigorous, empirically innovative, and sensibly and sensitively crafted.
Committee members:
Scott Barrett, Johns Hopkins University (chair)
W. Douglass Shaw, Texas A&M University
Jason F. Shogren, University of Wyoming
