Felix Schläpfer

Kalaidos Fachhochschule Schweiz · Wirtschaft

Survey-based estimates of willingness to pay for public goods or ecosystem services are increasingly used to support environmental policy decisions. Unfortunately, these estimates may involve substantial biases. Established guidelines for survey research do not provide sufficient conditions for valid estimates or require researchers to make potenti...

Surveys of stated willingness to pay (WTP) are increasingly used to assess the value of public goods and ecosystem services. However, the currently dominant survey protocols and practices are inadequate. This is most evident from robust findings that the valuations are heavily influenced by the response options or response scales used in the valuat...

Kosten und Finanzierung der Landwirtschaft - FAQ

Landwirtschaft, Vollkostenrechnung, externe Kosten, Subventionen, Direktzahlungen, Ernährung, Kostenträger, Konsumenten, Steuerzahler, Allgemeinheit, Umwelt, Klima, Stickstoff, Pestizide Agriculture, full cost accounting, public finance, externalities, subsidies, food production, consumer, taxpayer, society, environment, climate, nitrogen, pestici...

Landwirtschaft, Schweiz, Nahrungsmittel, gemeinwirtschaftliche Leistungen, Subventionen, Vollkostenrechnung, Ernährung, externe Kosten, Kostenträger, Konsument, Steuerzahler, Allgemeinheit, Umwelt, Klima, Stickstoff, Pestizide, Biodiversität Agriculture, Switzerland, food, public services, subsidies, full cost accounting, externalities, external c...

Costs and financing of Swiss agriculture - graphical summary

Cout et financement de l'agriculture Suisse

The costs of unintended side effects of agriculture such as water pollution cannot be directly observed in markets. However, the values society places on healthy agricultural environments are increasingly reflected in payments to farmers for measures to avoid or reduce environmental damage. This paper presents a framework for estimating external co...

Insights from behavioral economics have proven to be relevant for designing and analyzing stated preference (SP) studies. In this paper, we propose an empirical strategy in SP research that (1) evaluates what are arguably the key behavioral assumptions, (2) interprets the responses strictly in light of the outcomes of that evaluation, and (3) repor...

Grundlagen für aussagekräftigen Indikatoren für den Stand der Zielerreichung der Schweizer Agrarpolitik, insbesondere hinsichtlich der gesetzlichen Vorgaben

The Austrian Federal Forests (ÖBf), the Republic of Austria's state-owned company, manages 15% of the Austrian forests; about 50% of the land is devoted to nature conservation. This paper presents the results of a representative survey of Austrian households ascertaining the acceptance of, preferences regarding, and willingness to pay for three dif...

Die Wirtschaft ist heute nicht mehr ohne das Fachwissen der Psychologie zu verstehen! Dieses Lehrbuch gibt einen kompakten und doch vollständigen sowie praxisnahen Überblick über die Wirtschaftspsychologie. Es ordnet die Disziplin historisch ein und bietet eine ebenso kurzweilige wie interessante Darstellung aller relevanten Kernthemen. Durch viele...

We present a novel approach for estimating the demand value of public safety and apply it to road safety improvements in Switzerland. Survey responses by more than 1,000 eligible voters to questions about how much public spending on road safety should increase are combined with observations of their income tax and road usage to derive the value of...

We present a novel approach for estimating the demand value of public safety and apply it to road safety improvements in Switzerland. Survey responses by more than 1,000 eligible voters to questions about how much public spending on road safety should increase are combined with observations of their income tax and road usage to derive the value of...

Evaluations of agri-environment support at the European level are still rare. We used an expert survey to ex- amine agricultural support schemes in the EU, Norway and Switzerland in terms of the shares of the payments that compensate farmers and other recipients for the costs of providing services. Furthermore, we explored to which categories of ec...

Public support for agriculture in the European Union (EU) and other European countries targets two main objectives: providing public goods and securing a fair standard of living for farmers. However, whether the current level of spending on measures targeting these two goals reflects taxpayer preferences is unknown. We used a cross-section of count...

Im Umgang mit Finanzen spielen psychologische Phänomene eine wichtige Rolle. Experimente zeigen, dass rationales Verhalten im Sinn der ökonomischen Theorie eher die Ausnahme als die Regel ist. Aber menschliches Verhalten weicht nicht einfach zufällig von den Vorhersagen der ökonomischen Theorie ab. Die Abweichungen sind systematisch und in vielen F...

Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft verändern sich laufend. Wichtige Ursachen sind technologische und demografische Entwicklungen, aber auch psychologische Bedingungen wie Einstellungen zu Fortschritt oder gesellschaftliche Werte. Ein wichtiges Ziel unserer Anstrengungen – und ein augenfälliger Aspekt des Wandels – ist die Zunahme des materiellen Wohlstand...

Zwischen individuellem wirtschaftlichem Verhalten und gesellschaftlichen Zuständen bestehen vielfältige Wechselwirkungen. Beispielsweise beeinflusst unser Konsumverhalten die Wirtschaftslage – und umgekehrt. Der Einfluss einer einzelnen Person oder eines Unternehmens auf die gesamtwirtschaftliche oder gesellschaftliche Situation ist meist marginal,...

Bartkowski and Lienhoop (2017) comment on the DV approach which I proposed in an earlier issue. They conclude that DMV overcomes some flaws of conventional stated preference (SP) methods, addresses many of my concerns and at the same time avoids some of the problems generated by DV. Several of their comments are debatable. A closer look at DMV in c...

Faktenblatt Vision Landwirtschaft

Faktenblatt Vision Landwirtschaft

The now dominant survey approaches to value public services remain contentious. A common explanation is that stated preferences are generally difficult to measure. I argue that the key problems of the dominant survey approaches can be explained more specifically by their ambition to measure individuals' (maximum) willingness to pay (WTP). To estima...

Over the past two decades, Swiss agriculture has made almost no progress in dealing with its nitrogen surplus which is perhaps the sector’s main sustainability problem. One possible way to solve this problem would be to implement a market-based policy instrument that decreases the nitrogen surplus in a cost-efficient manner on the basis of a pollut...

The wider range of stated preference approaches to value public goods has not been systematically reviewed in recent years. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of this literature and to evaluate the strengths and limitations of alternative approaches. Since the public referendum has served as a ‘blueprint’ for survey design, two k...

Faktenblatt Vision Landwirtschaft

The hedonic pricing approach has been successfully applied to estimate the economic value of environmental amenities in urban settings, but the results for landscape variables remain relatively inconsistent across studies. Here, we use national-level data and an existing typology of communities to examine how land use and environmental amenities an...

Traditional stated preference theory does not provide useful guidance on hypothetical bias because the bias lies outside the theory. Not surprisingly, meta-analyses using variables from the theory have not revealed consistent patterns of bias. We find that these models are substantially improved by including two additional variables drawn from posi...

Faktenblatt Vision Landwirtschaft

Benefits from providing a local public good such as landscape protection may depend on individuals’ physical surroundings, as well as on socio-economic factors such as income. A framework is formulated that describes public support for regional landscape protection as a function of socio-economic variables and land use patterns. Models are then est...

This paper proposes a method by which estimates of hypothetical willingness to pay for public goods with passive-use value can be compared with actual willingness to pay inferred from aggregate voting and tax liability data. Acknowledgements We are grateful to Robert Deacon and Peter Moser for helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript,...

Controversy remains over the degree of hypothetical bias in contingent valutation method (CVM) estimates of values for public goods, especially for public goods with significant passive-use values. This paper uses an 'indifferent voter' approach to calibrate stated WTP for a proposed public good increase with actual WTP implied by voting and tax li...

This paper compares contingent values for a hypothetical landscape protection programme with respondents’ voting behaviour in an actual referendum. We use the example of a proposed increase of expenditures for landscape protection in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland. In particular we examine (i) CVM bid magnitudes of the different voter groups, (i...

Several recent regional and migration studies have identified landscape amenities as potentially important drivers of migration and local economic change in the United States. To date, these empirical approaches have rarely been applied to European data in spite of an impressive European cultural landscape heritage. Here, we apply a regional adjust...

Surveys are sometimes used to assess preferences towards policy issues that are remote from experience and that have never been publicly discussed. How do these preferences of isolated survey respondents compare with preferences expressed by voters who have access to advice from competing political parties? I address this question by conducting a f...

Das Buch analysiert die aktuellen Entwicklungen in der Landwirtschaft und deren Wirkungen auf die Produktion von Lebensmitteln, auf die Umwelt und auf die von der Verfassung geforderten gemeinwirtschaftlichen Leistungen. Dabei werden grosse Defizite zu Tage gefördert, aber auch Stärken und Chancen der heutigen Agrarpolitik aufgezeigt. Herzstück des...

With rapid urban expansion and loss of open space, attractive local landscapes will continue to gain importance in location decisions and on political agendas. The present study reviews the evidence on the local economic role of landscape amenities from two major strands of empirical research, migration and regional economic models, and hedonic pri...

Billions of dollars are now spent annually in the United States and Europe for spatially delineated environmental services such as agricultural landscape management and river restoration programs, yet little is known about the spatial distribution of the benefits from these policies. This paper develops a framework for recovering information on thi...

Research output in economics is commonly measured based on the reputation of the journals in which an author has published. Using data from the 2010 Handelsblatt ranking of economists in German speaking countries and citation data from the Web of Science, we examine the relationship between reputation and citation frequency at the level of individu...

Faktenblatt Vision Landwirtschaft

Traditionally, economists make a sharp distinction between stated and revealed preferences, viewing the latter as more fully meeting the assumptions of economic analysis. Here, we consider one form of empirical evidence regarding this belief: the consistency of choices in stated and revealed preference tasks. We show that both kinds of task can pro...

Unlike in other disciplines, research output in economics is commonly measured based on the disciplinary reputation of the journals in which an author has published. Here, I examine how much output measures based on journal reputation tell us about the academic interest and relevance of economic papers as measured by frequency of citation. Using da...

Unlike in other disciplines, research output in economics is commonly measured based on the disciplinary reputation of the journals in which an author has published. Here, I examine how much output measures based on journal reputation tell us about the academic interest and relevance of economic papers as measured by frequency of citation. Using da...

The primary evidence about the factors determining successful self-governance of common-pool resources (CPR) has come from case studies. More recently, this observational evidence has been complemented by insights from economic experiments. Here we advance a third approach in which the role of local deliberation about the management of a fishery re...

Unlike in other disciplines, research output in economics is commonly measured based on the journal titles in which an author has published. Here, I examine how much output measures based on journal titles tell us about the academic interest and relevance of economic papers as measured by citation frequency. Using data from the 2008 Handelsblatt ra...

With continuing loss of open space around growing urban centers, measures to maintain periurban landscape quality are gaining importance on political agendas. Understanding the demand for alternative approaches to landscape management is crucial for designing efficient policies and acceptable financing arrangements. Here, we analyze voter support f...

While much effort has been devoted to estimating market premiums for non-genetically modified (GM) food, the results of such research are largely silent about the preferences for the public good aspects, or externalities, of GM food production. For public goods, the closest substitute of private consumption decisions is voting on referenda. In Nove...

Die Abwägung von Kosten und Nutzen spielt bei der Bereitstellung öffentlicher Güter eine zentrale Rolle. Mithilfe welcher Methode lässt sich der Nutzen öffentlicher Güter am besten schätzen? Welche typischen konzeptionellen und empirischen Probleme treten bei den einzelnen Schätzmethoden häufig auf?

After several decades of academic research on the contingent valuation (CV) method a consistent behavioral explanation of ‘hypothetical bias’ is still lacking. Based on evidence from economics, economic psychology and the political sciences, I propose an explanation that is based on two simple working hypotheses about respondent behavior in conting...

Die Abwägung von Kosten und Nutzen spielt bei der Bereitstellung öffentlicher Güter eine zentrale Rolle. Mithilfe welcher Methode lässt sich der Nutzen öffentlicher Güter am besten schätzen? Welche typischen konzeptionellen und empirischen Probleme treten bei den einzelnen Schätzmethoden häufig auf?

In November 2005, 55.7 percent of 2 million Swiss voters approved a 5-year moratorium (ban) on the commercial cultivation of genetically modified (GM) plants within Switzerland. The present study examines how individual voting decisions were determined by (i) socioeconomic characteristics, (ii) political preference/ideology and (iii) agreement with...

This paper examines the role of simplified heuristics in the formation of preferences for public goods. Political scientists have suggested that voters use simplified heuristics based on the positions of familiar parties to infer how a proposed policy will affect them and to cast a vote in line with their interests and values. Here, we use a two-st...

Quality of life factors continue to gain importance in residential location decisions as well as location decisions of firms. One such factor is an attractive local landscape. The aim of this paper is to provide a survey of the empirical literature on the role of landscape amenities in local economic change. Following common amenity definitions, we...

This study investigates how access to political endorsements affects stated preferences for an environmental public good in Switzerland. We developed a contingent valuation survey questionnaire with two valuation questions, the first formulated as a (hypothetical) policy referendum, the second an open-ended WTP question. For the referendum question...

Green et al. (1998) [Green, D., Jacowitz, K.E., Kahneman, D., McFadden, D., 1998. Referendum contigent valuation, anchoring, and willingness to pay for public goods. Resource and Energy Economics 20 (2), 85−116] show theoretically that stated preference questions about public services can be framed in such ways that if the subjects accept the frame...

While budgets for agri-environmental policy in OECD countries are rapidly increasing with current policy reforms, information about the locally varying demands for policies implemented at various levels of government remains scarce. In this study, a median voter framework is used to analyse the demand for landscape management services based on the...

In 1997, about 140,000 citizens in 388 voting districts in the Swiss canton of Bern passed a ballot initiative to allocate about 3 million Swiss Francs annually to a canton-wide river restoration program. Using the municipal voting returns and a detailed georeferenced data set on the ecomorphological status of the rivers, we estimate models of vote...

We asked whether differences in abundance and seed prodtiction of Brachypodium pinnatum after 16 yr of four different experimental land use regimes were reflected in differences in vegetative dispersal distance, clone diversity, clone area, and the proportions of sexual and vegetative recruitment. Mean vegetative dispersal distance was 5.5 mm yr‘....

Income effects reported in contingent valuation (CV) studies tend to be much smaller than those found in the literature on collective choice. This disparity has received surprisingly little attention by environmental economists. The present study uses meta-analysis to explore determinants of the presence/absence of a significant income effect in a...

Contingent valuation (CV) is a widely used but controversial survey-based technique for estimating the nonmarket benefits of environmental goods and services. This study is the first to compare the outcome of a self-contained CV survey with the outcome of a collective decision, by contrasting hypothetical willingness to pay with willingness to pay...

1. Understanding ecosystem responses to plant species loss is essential for the optimal management of grasslands. Recent studies have examined the effects of simulated random species loss in experimental plant communities but not those of realistic non-random species loss resulting from transient extinction pressures in semi-natural grasslands. 2....

Zusammenfassung G egenwärtig werden die Weichen gestellt für die Neuausrichtung der öffentlichen Beiträge an die Landwirtschaft (AP 2011). Die erstmals in der Schweizer Agrarpolitik drohenden Budgetkürzungen und die für die Landwirtschaft existentiellen Forderungen der WTO werden grundsätzliche Anpassungen unumgänglich machen. Derzeit werden nur mi...

This study reports the results from an in-person comparison of contingent valuation (CV) survey response and subsequent voting behaviour on comparable propositions to increase public spending for landscape protection. A substantial proportion of CV responses were not consistent with self-reported actual voting decisions, suggesting an upward bias o...

One of the main problems in using environmental cost-benefit analysis is deciding on the relevant population: whose benefits should we count? This is important since aggregate benefits depend on both per-person benefit and the number of beneficiaries. Yet this latter term is often hard to evaluate. Distance-decay functions are one way of addressing...

Agricultural support is increasingly flowing into the maintenance and improvement of landscape quality. While variations in the demand for landscape protection have been successfully attributed to variations in socio-economic characteristics, the effect of the local landscape setting as a potential determinant of environmental preferences has recei...

Recent ecological experiments suggest that theinterannual stability of ecosystem productivitymay be determined by the diversity of organismspresent in the system. We investigate whethersuch effects of biotic diversity on ecosystemstability may translate into economic valuesand possibly into an economic argument for themaintenance of biodiversity in...

Agronomists consider the continuity and nutrient capturing properties of cover crops as important determinants of nutrient cycling in agricultural systems. Managing for these biotic control functions can help limit nutrient loss and groundwater contamination between main crop harvests. This simulation study highlights the potentiat role of cover cr...

In 1995 the Swiss people voted a constitutional article which tied agricultural subsidies to ecological requirements. Among other measures, farmers had to convert at least 7% of their land to semi-natural biotopes (ecological compensation areas - ECA). Major ECA are extensified grassland, traditional orchards, hedges, wild flower strips. The introd...

The increasing evidence for effects of biodiversity on ecosystem properties and processes indicates that effects may vary strongly over the range of studied systems. In order to explore patterns and draw some preliminary conclusions on biodiversity effects in different ecological contexts, we have compiled empirical data from original studies and r...

Attempts to assess the functional importance of biodiversity in ecosystems continue to stimulate debate on the potential impacts of biodiversity losses. However, finding experimental setups to realistically simulate current and anticipated species loss turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Uncertainties concern the relevance of the present empiri...

Summary Information about the distribution of the benefits of environmental improvements is fundamental to the design of successful environmental policies. Here, we analyse voter support for a large river restoration programme in the canton of Bern, Switzerland, in relation to local measures of river quality, potential for restoration, mean income...

(Abstract on following page)

Political discussion preceeding public referendum decisions usually generates a wealth of information about the likely consequences of proposed policies. Political scientists have found that widely available 'information shortcuts' such as voting recommendations issued by political parties and interest groups allow uninformed voters to emulate the...