Seminars

Shinn-Shyr Wang
University of Massachusetts Amherst

"Buyer Market Power and Vertically Differentiated Retailers" >>pdf

Rui Huang
University of Connecticut

"Exposure to Obesity and Weight Gain Among Adolescents" >>pdf

Jordan Suter
Oberlin College

"Dynamic Pollution Taxes Under Regulatory Uncertainty" >>pdf

Cesar Viteri Mejia
Department of Resource Economics
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Valuation of attributes of Galapagos Islands tourism: A discrete choice experiment

John Baffes
Development Prospects Group
The World Bank

Are you too young for the Noble Prize? >>pdf

ABSTRACT: If the contributions of a relatively young and a relatively old persons are recognized as Nobel-worthy at the same time, will the older person receive the award earlier? According to Alfred Nobel's will it should not. However, estimates from an econometric model that attempts to explain the age of Nobel Prize winners suggest an age premium associated with older candidates, based on a panel of all awards from 1901 to 2007. Specifically, the results show that making the Nobel-worthy contribution a year later delays the Prize by less than a year, while sharing the Nobel Prize reduces the age of the Nobel recipient by almost 2 years. Delaying finishing education by a year, also leads to a delay in receiving the Nobel by less than a year in some cases. The results also suggest that the Nobel committee "rushed" the Prize to older candidates during the first decade of the Nobel, which could be explained by a relatively large stock of candidates. Similarly, a positive and highly significant time trend may reflect the expanding pool of candidates (and hence older candidates) as the population and the number of educated people rises, and life expectancy increases. Networking also seems to matter, with the Prize awarded to younger candidates when they work in an institution with Laureates in the same field. Other factors such as gender and location of research do not seem to have a robust impact. Forecasts of the age of the Nobel Prize recipients based on the specifications by field compare very well with actual age.

Juan Camilo Cardenas
Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor of Latin American Studies
Harvard University

"Dynamics of Rules and Resources: Three New Field Experiments on Water, Forests and Fisheries" >>pdf
Juan-Camilo Cardenas (Universidad de Los Andes-Colombia) Marco Janssen (Arizona State University-USA) Francois Bousquet (CIRAD-France). Chapter submitted for a "Handbook on Experimental Economics and the Environment" edited by John List and Michael Price (Edward Elgar Publishing).

ABSTRACT: Most common-pool resource experiments, inspired by the ground-breaking work of Ostrom, Gardner and Walker (1994), involve a typical structure of a static non-linear social dilemma with a rival but non- excludable good that is extracted by a number of players. However there are specific ecological features of relevant common-pool resources that can be incorporated into an experimental design and tested in the field or the lab. Stock effects, spatial effects or vertical downstream externalities are issues that natural scientists and economists have studied in forests, fisheries or watershed management although experimental works on these ecological aspects are rather scarce.

We designed three resource specific games to capture particular characteristics of common-pool resources and apply them in six villages in Thailand and Colombia. In each village we recruited 60 people and conducted three games. A water irrigation game capturing the downstream externalities and collective action problem of provision and appropriation stages where all players need to contribute to a public project that produces water which is then extracted sequentially by each of the players starting with the one located upstream, leaving the remaining water to the next player downstream, and so on. In our forestry game players start with a number of standing trees that can be cut by any of the players; in any round each player can extract between zero and a fixed number of trees. The remaining trees re- grow at a certain rate and the resulting trees are then left for the next round for individual extraction. The game ends at a maximum number of rounds or when no trees are left. Finally, the fisheries game involves two possible fishing sites that can have high or low levels of stock. Each player needs to decide where to fish between the two sites and her individual effort of fishing. Depending on the aggregate level of fishing effort in each site, the stock level will change for the following round and will determine the fishing returns. All games involve a social dilemma where individual interests clash with the socially optimal outcome. Lessons can be derived regarding the design of better resource management rules and a better understanding of how resource specific dynamics affect the social dilemmas in common- pool resources.

Shelia M. Olmstead
Associate Professor of Environmental Economics
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

Sampling Out: Regulatory Design and the Total Coliform Rule >>pdf
Lori S. Bennear, Katrina K. Jessoe and Sheila M. Olmstead

Shinn-Shyr Wang
Research Associate
Department of Resource Economics
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Market Value Maximization through Strategic Delegation >>pdf

Shinn-Shyr Wang, Kyle Stiegert (Associate Professor, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Kate Sims
Assistant Professor of Economics
Amherst College

Protected Areas, Land Use and Local Economic Development: Evidence from Northern Thailand

Mark Stehr
Associate Professor of Economics
Drexel University

Intended and Unintended Effects of Youth Helmet Laws >>pdf

The Role of Preference Uncertainty in the Willingness to Pay - Willingness to Accept Disparity: An Experimental Test >>pdf

David Kingsley
Department of Economics and Management, Westfield State College

Wildfire prevention and mitigation: The case of southern Greece

Nikolaos Zirogiannis
Department of Resource Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst