Some outdoor recreation activities are regulated and require participants to have a permit or license (e.g., hunting and fishing). However, wildlife watching—and especially birdwatching—is a non-consumptive activity that requires no permit or license and thus leaves few formal data trails. Crowd-sourced data with associated volunteered geographic information, gathered by a variety of citizen/community science projects and social media platforms, can complement the information about non-consumptive activities provided by standard administrative datasets.
Members of Cornell University's eBird project report bird sitings at geo-coded destinations. With origin information, we can infer the value to this group of biodiversity in bird species by observing how much more in travel costs they are willing to incur to gain opportunities to see more diverse populations of birds.
We use monthly panel data on birth outcomes for more than 3000 U.S. counties, combined with the timing of heat waves during trimesters of gestation, to identify statistical relationships between prenatal exposure and adverse outcomes for the newborn or the mother.
Members of Cornell University's eBird project report bird sitings at geo-coded destinations. With origin information, we can infer the value to this group of biodiversity in bird species by observing how much more in travel costs they are willing to incur to gain opportunities to see more diverse populations of birds.
A failed 2010 ballot proposition sought an $18 per year increase in vehicle registration fees to provide revenue to support state parks. Using data aggregated to the census tract level, we examine factors that affected this effort to retreat somewhat from a `user pays' approach to funding state parks.
In numerous regions around the globe, climate change can be expected to change the pattern of severe weather events. The nature of future changes in these patterns can be difficult to predict, but it is instructive to consider some of the potential consequences of extreme weather on household migration decisions based on past events. We examine bi-directional county-to-county migration flows in the U.S., treating various types of extreme weather events as random exogenous shocks to the affected communities and their economies.
Data from a tornado shelter (safe-room) rebate program in Arkansas from 2006 through 2010 permits us to examine the role of risk perceptions in stimulating homeowner investments in self-protection. The decision to self-protect depends upon both the recency and the proximity of tornado events, as well as on average education and income levels in the county in question. The pulse in self-protection investment after a tornado is relatively large, yet short-lived and relatively local, and there is some evidence that short-run supply constraints limit the expression of peak demand over time and across space.
We examine migration patterns around seven Superfund sites, from 1970 to 2000, including periods of remediation. There is little evidence of groups “coming to the nuisance” in these data. One possible reason is that households may have had different perceptions about the environmental hazards of the sites, and these perceptions may have changed over time in unpredictable ways. The sites may be perceived to be improving if they are remediated, or, alternatively, the sites may be permanently stigmatized.
We examine the sale prices of nearly 34,000 homes near sites in three metropolitan areas for up to a 30-year period. Our results are both surprising and inconsistent with most prior work. The principal result is that, when cleanup is delayed for 10, 15, and even up to 20 years, the discounted present value of the cleanup is mostly lost. A possible explanation for these property value losses is that the sites are stigmatized and the homes in the surrounding communities are shunned. The results suggest that expedited cleanup and minimizing the number of stigmatizing events would reduce these losses.
In hedonic property value models, economists typically assume that changing perceptions of environmental risk should be captured by changes in housing prices. For long-lived risks emanating from point sources, however, many other features of neighborhoods seem to change as well. Households relocate in response to changes in. perceived environmental quality. We consider spatial patterns in selected census variables over three decades in the vicinity of four Superfund sites. We find many examples of moving and staying behavior, inferred from changes in the relative concentrations of a wide range of socio-demographic groups in census tracts near the site versus farther away.