Michael Hanemann

• Arizona State University

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the need to quickly deploy non-pharmaceutical measures like facemasks to reduce transmission rates into sharp focus. Factors influencing this behavior are examined through the classic attitude–behavior lens of Fishbein and Ajzen [Belief, Attitude, Intention, and Behavior: An Introduction to Theory and Research. Reading...

In economics, the value of an item—including water—to a person is defined as the most of something else of value (typically money, but sometimes time) the person is willing to give up to obtain that item (willingness to pay) or the minimum compensation the person would want to receive in exchange for forgoing the item (willingness to accept). These...

In economics, a merit good is a good which it is judged that an individual or group of individuals should have (at least up to a certain quantity) on the basis of some concept of need, rather than on the basis of ability or willingness to pay. Examples include public elementary education and free hospitals for the poor alongside access to safe, aff...

Water for cultural and religious purposes, referred to as ceremonial and subsistence (C&S) use, is a distinctive feature of many Indigenous and other communities. Whether this constitutes a legitimate claim for water for an American Indian Tribe in the United States was litigated in the context of a trial to determine the federal government’s oblig...

Introduction Public perception of the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to six other major public health problems (alcoholism and drug use, HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, lung cancer and respiratory diseases caused by air pollution and smoking, and water-borne diseases like diarrhea) is unclear. We designed a survey to examine this is...

We provide estimates of health priorities during the COVID-19 pandemic based on web-surveys administered in seven developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in 2022. Using the best-worst scaling method, respondents ranked the importance of seven health problems, including COVID-19 (the others were alcohol and drugs, HIV/AIDS, malaria,...

Objectives Wearing masks could still be one of the few non-pharmaceutical interventions for controlling the pandemic. There are people who wear them and people who don't, but this framing to be overly simplistic. We aim to chart the contradictions in attitudes and behavior regarding mask wearing and describe the messaging challenge that these gener...

Objective To determine the relative importance members of the US public place on different patient attributes in triage decisions about who should receive the last available intensive care unit (ICU) bed. Methods A discrete choice experiment was conducted with a nationally representative sample of 2000 respondents from the YouGov internet panel of...

We measure the value placed by the American public on ensuring the continued existence of the traditional Hopi culture and way of life at the Hopi Reservation in Arizona. The Hopi are the oldest living culture in the United States. The continued existence of the Reservation is threatened by depletion of the groundwater resource underlying the reser...

When large-scale accidents cause catastrophic damage to natural or cultural resources, government and industry are faced with the challenge of assessing the extent of damages and the magnitude of restoration that is warranted. Although market transactions for privately owned assets provide information about how valuable they are to the people invol...

Downscaled climate change projections for California, when translated into changes in irrigation water delivery and then into profit from agriculture in the Central Valley, show an increase in conventional measures of variability such as the variance. However, these increases are modest and mask a more pronounced increase in downside risk, defined...

The proposed interoceanic canal will connect the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean, traversing Lake Nicaragua, the major freshwater reservoir in Central America. If completed, the canal would be the largest infrastructure-related excavation project on Earth. In November 2015, the Nicaraguan government approved an environmental and social impact...

Desrvousges et al. (2012) investigate criteria for judging the adequacy of scope test differences in contingent valuation studies. They focus particular attention on our study (Chapman et al. 2009), arguing that, while it demonstrated a statistically significant scope effect, the effect is too small. Unfortunately, DMT misinterpreted Chapman et al....

There have been dramatic advances in understanding the physical science of climate change, facilitated by substantial and reliable research support. The social value of these advances depends on understanding their implications for society, an arena where research support has been more modest and research progress slower. Some advances have been ma...

This paper draws on the history of irrigation in the US West to address two sets of questions: First, did problems of collective action arise during the development of irrigation in that region? If so, were they successfully resolved? If so, how—did the solution align with Ostrom, 1993. Water Resour. Res. 29 (7), 1907–1912 design principles? Second...

This article reviews the rapidly growing literature on structural models of complementary choices. It discusses recent modeling developments and identifies promising areas for future research.

This paper scrutinises the use of ecosystem service valuation for marine planning. Lessons are drawn from the development and use of environmental valuation and cost-benefit analysis for policy-making in the US and the UK. Current approaches to marine planning in both countries are presented and the role that ecosystem service valuation could play...

This paper scrutinises the use of ecosystem service valuation for marine planning. Lessons are drawn from the development and use of environmental valuation and cost-benefit analysis for policy-making in the US and the UK. Current approaches to marine planning in both countries are presented and the role that ecosystem service valuation could play...

Estimation of consistent parameter estimates for recreational demand models faces challenges arising from the choice-based nature of the data collected primarily for resource management purposes. As an alternative to randomized respondent-based sampling, choice-based onsite sampling can provide information on actual choices made by a subset of the...

Transport is essential for the control of future greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and thus a target for active policy intervention in the future. Yet, social preferences for policies are likely to play an important role. In this paper we first review the existing literature on preferences regarding low-GHG car fuels, but also covering policy instrume...

This paper explores the welfare costs associated with drought plan transactions between a public municipal water agency, the El Dorado Irrigation District (EID) in California USA and its customers. The EID imposes a tiered pricing plan for municipal customers, which was analyzed as a discrete continuous choice (DCC) model by water users within a cl...

Buildings are crucial to control present and future energy demand and, therefore, greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. In this chapter we suggest that, due to a number of general and specific barriers to the implementation of energy efficiency in buildings, energy prices and conventional energy and environmental policy instruments may n...

In a series of studies employing a variety of approaches, we have found that the potential impact of climate change on US agriculture is likely negative. Deschênes and Greenstone (2007) report dramatically different results based on regressions of agricultural profits and yields on weather variables. The divergence is explained by (1) missing and i...

We use a contingent valuation (CV) study of childhood asthma to discuss a central issue in designing CV studies of chronic illness-the need for a detailed, realistic scenario that minimizes confounding factors-and show how to address this issue. We apply our methodology to estimate households' willingness to pay (WTP) for reductions in asthma morbi...

The political deadlock around national renewable energy mandates in the US does not reflect the public's position. Research shows that people there would support a renewable energy standard even with a cost attached.

Climate and energy use are inextricably linked but change in climate and energy prices will affect food production from changes in input prices as well as changes in yield from temperature and precipitation with consequent changes in irrigation. This talk will discuss these and other important linkages among food, water, energy and climate.

Since 2006 the scientific community in California, in cooperation with resource managers, has been conducting periodic statewide studies about the potential impacts of climate change on natural and managed systems. This Special Issue is a compilation of revised papers that originate from the most recent assessment that concluded in 2009. As with th...

Climate change will affect the demand of many resources that households consume, including electricity and natural gas. Although price is considered an effective tool for controlling demand for many resources that households consume, including electricity and natural gas, there is disagreement about the exact magnitude of the price elasticity. Part...

Climate change impacts and potential adaptation strategies were assessed using an application of the Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) system developed for the Sacramento River basin and Delta export region of the San Joaquin Valley. WEAP is an integrated rainfall/runoff, water resources systems modeling framework that can be forced directly fro...

Spain faces a complex situation regarding its climate change policies. On the one hand, greenhouse gas emissions have shown an important increase since 1990, being far from the Kyoto commitments. On the other hand, Spain is likely to suffer important impacts from climate change. However, there has been a rather limited application of corrective pol...

The State of California is committed to preparing periodic climate change impacts and adaptation assessments to inform and develop policy in the State. The most recent assessment was released late in 2009 and a new vulnerability and adaptation assessment is underway for release in late 2011. Both assessments use IPCC climate simulations that were s...

In this paper, we extend the latent segmentation approach to the Kuhn–Tucker (KT) model. The proposed approach models heterogeneity in preferences for recreational behavior, using a utility theoretical framework to simultaneously model participation and site selection decisions. Estimation of the latent segmentation KT model with standard maximum l...

Influenced by the success of emission trading in the US for sulphur dioxide (SO2), some economists have argued for an upstream, economy-wide cap-and-trade scheme as the primary tool for achieving the required reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper addresses that argument and concludes that cap-and-trade will need to be accompanied...

The paper reviews the history of Bay-Delta decision-making in California in order to highlight the continuity between what happened with CALFED and what happened in the preceding decades since water project deliveries began in 1949. Throughout this period, there has been intense conflict about whether and how to transfer water from the Bay-Delta to...

This paper focuses on two specific issues in the design of a domestic cap and trade program for GHGs - whether the cap should be located upstream or downstream, and whether trading alone will suffice to achieve the desired reduction in GHGs or will need to be supplemented with additional regulatory measures. The paper argues for a downstream cap ac...

The 1980s were designated the International Water and Sanitation Decade, and the international community committed itself to ensuring that everyone in the world would have access to at least basic water and sanitation services by 1990. This target was not met. While hundreds of millions did receive access to new services, at the end of the decade w...

Foreword This paper (and the large study behind it) was in some ways a labor of love. We set out to build a discrete choice model to predict recreational fishing behavior that would extend the literature along several dimensions. our interest in doing so stemmed from ear-lier work that we were individually or collectively involved in. hanemann's di...

Despite the existence of a large and growing literature on the potential impact of climate change on agriculture, there still exists some disagreement about the magnitude and even the sign. Our own research suggests that the impact on U.S. agriculture is likely to be strongly negative, based on a series of studies in which we link farmland values t...

In this paper we present a new utility model that serves as the basis for modeling discrete/continuous consumer choices with a general corner solution.The new model involves a more flexible representation of preferences than what has been used in the previous literature and, unlike most of this literature, it is not additively separable. This funct...

We review the discussion at a workshop whose goal was to achieve a better integration among behavioral, economic, and statistical approaches to choice modeling. The workshop explored how current approaches to the specification, estimation, and application of choice models might be improved to better capture the diversity of processes that are postu...

This article analyzes the main projects of the Spanish National Hydrological Plans of 2001 and 2005, the Ebro interbasin transfer and the A.G.U.A. projects, prompted by acute water scarcity and the ensuing severe degradation of the southeastern basins in the Iberian peninsula. The strong policy debate on both projects highlights the difficulties in...

Discussion of policy approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions currently centers on emission trading, virtually to the exclusion of all other options. While trading has a place in the policy portfolio needed to mitigate global warming, it alone will not be sufficient to solve the problem. Emission trading has lowered the costs of achieving ce...

The evaluation of health care programmes is commonly approached with stated preference methods such as contingent valuation or discrete choice experiments. These methods provide useful information for policy decisions involving health regulations and infrastructures for health care. However, econometric modelling of these data usually relies on a n...

In response to an Executive Order by California Governor Schwarzenegger, an evaluation of the implications to California of possible climate changes was undertaken using a scenario-based approach. The “Scenarios Project” investigated projected impacts of climate change on six sectors in the California region. The investigation considered the early,...

Over the last few years, California has passed some of the strongest climate policies in the USA. These new policies have been motivated in part by increasing concerns over the risk of climate-related impacts and facilitated by the state’s existing framework of energy and air quality policies. This paper presents an overview of the evolution of thi...

This paper argues that there are many challenges to designing and implementing water and sanitation interventions that actually deliver economic benefits to the households in developing countries. Perhaps most critical to successful water and sanitation investments is to discover and implement forms of service and payment mechanisms that will rende...

We analyze cost-benefit analysis and social discounting in a framework with intertemporally dependent preferences. Here the marginal contribution of an additional unit of consumption in some period depends on what is consumed in other periods. We use a simple model of history dependent preferences to analyze how habit formation affects the social r...

Researchers using revealed preference data have mostly relied on the Mixed Logit (ML) framework to model unobserved heterogeneity. In this paper, we suggest an extension of this model where we integrate direct measures of taste and revealed preferences, under a unified econometric setting, to describe heterogeneous preferences for congestion in rec...

In this paper we present a new utility model that serves as the basis for modeling discrete/continuous consumer choices with a general corner solution. The new model involves a more flexible representation of preferences than what has been used in the previous literature and, unlike most of this literature, it is not additively separable. This func...

This paper uses a finite mixture logit (FML) model to investigate the heterogeneity of preferences of beach users for water quality at beaches in Southern California. The results are compared with conventional approaches based conditional logit (CL) and random parameters logit (RPL). The FML approach captures variation in preferences by modeling in...

Although complex pricing schedules are increasingly common in utility billing, it is difficult to determine whether consumers respond to complicated marginal prices because price changes are often confounded with simultaneous demand shocks or non-price policies. To overcome this challenge, we exploit a natural experiment - the introduction of a thi...

Valuation of morbidity associated with childhood asthma is signi…cant both to policy and to non-market valuation methodologies. Our results show that household perceptions and beliefs, such as belief in one’s ability to predict and control asthma attacks, and relative perceptions of the overall burden asthma places on a family, have a larger im...

Este artículo examina los principales proyectos de los Planes Hidrológicos de 2001 y de 2005, el trasvase del Ebro y el programa A.G.U.A., diseñados para resolver los problemas de escasez y degradación de los recursos hídricos en el sureste peninsular. El intenso debate sobre ambos proyectos muestra las dificultades para conseguir una gestión soste...

Several recent studies have found that the impact of climate change on U.S. agriculture is likely to be adverse overall, though a northern tier of states will benefit. This finding is chal-lenged by Deschenes and Greenstone (2007) [henceforth, DG], who link annual fluctuations in weather to reported profits and yields in the same year and conclude...

We use the geo-referenced June Agricultural Survey of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to match values of individual farms in California with a measure of water availability as mediated through irrigation districts, and degree days, a nonlinear transformation of temperature, controlling for other influences on value such as soil quality, to exami...

We estimate the price elasticity of water demand with household-level data, structurally modeling the piecewise-linear budget constraints imposed by increasing block pricing. We develop a mathematical expression for the unconditional price elasticity of demand under increasing block prices and compare conditional and unconditional elasticities anal...

We provide a new, more general, definition for the irreversibility effect and demonstrate its relevance to problems involving environmental and other decisions under uncertainty. We establish several analytical and numerical results that suggest both that the effect holds more widely than generally recognized, and that an existing result (Epstein’s...

There is an emerging consensus in the scientific community that climate change has the potential to significantly alter prevailing hydrologic patterns in California over the course of the 21st Century. This is of profound importance for a system where large investments have been made in hydraulic infrastructure that has been designed and is operate...

This article analyzes the Ebro inter-basin transfer, which was the main project of the Spanish National Hydrological Plan. The Ebro transfer was prompted by pervasive pressures, scarcity and degradation of Southeastern basins in Spain. The heated policy debate on the Ebro transfer highlights the difficulties of achieving a sustainable management of...

This paper explains the economic conception of water - how economists think about water. It consists of two main sections. First, it reviews the economic concept of value, explains how it is measured, and discusses how this has been applied to water in various ways. Then it considers the debate regarding whether or not water can, or should, be trea...

The demand for recreation exhibits intertemporal substitution, as well as spatial substitution. In this paper, we develop a dynamic Kuhn-Tucker model of recreation demand with intertemporal substitution effects, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. We propose a dynamic extension of the traditional static Kuhn-Tucker model and apply thi...

We link farmland values to climatic, soil, and socioeconomic variables for U.S. counties east of the 100th meridian, the historical boundary of agriculture not primarily dependent on irrigation. Degree days, a nonlinear transformation of the climatic variables suggested by agronomic experiments as more relevant to crop yield, gives an improved fit...

Value estimates for environmental goods can be obtained by either estimating preference parameters as “revealed” through behavior related to some aspect of the amenity or using “stated” information concerning preferences for the good. In the environmental economics literature the stated preference approach has come to be known as “contingent valuat...

From a practical perspective, (arguably) most consumer decisions are not made in isolation of the households in which consumers are inserted, yet we commonly treat them econometrically as if they were. The purpose of this workshop was to take some initial steps in defining needed research in household decision making that structurally accounts for...

The law of torts plays an important role in completing the legal property rights system by defining the extent to which property is protected from harm. It does this by defining the kinds of interests that will be recognized and protected from harm by the courts, the duty of care owed these recognized interests by others, and the manner in which th...

Among others who point to environmental variability and managerial uncertainty as causes of fishery collapse, Roughgarden and Smith (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 93 (1996) 5078) argue that three sources of uncertainty are important for fisheries management: variability in fish dynamics, inaccurate stock size estimates, and inaccurate implementation of ha...

We propose a detailed analysis of heterogeneity in households’ responses to water conservation programs (price increase, voluntary and mandatory conservation) during periods of water shortage. Using a unique dataset covering water consumption of all residential users in Los Angeles (California) during the drought (1988-1992), we show that househo...

Urban water pricing provides an opportunity to examine whether consumers react to the shape of supply functions. We carry out an empirical analysis of the influence of price and price structure on residential water demand, using the most price-diverse, detailed, household-level water demand data yet available for this purpose. We adapt the Hausman...

This manual offers a detailed, up-to-date explanation of how to carry out economic valuation using stated preference techniques. It is relevant for the application of these techniques to all non-market goods and services including air and water quality; provision of public open space; health care that is not sold through private markets; risk reduc...

The magnitude of future climate change depends substantially on the greenhouse gas emission pathways we choose. Here we explore the implications of the highest and lowest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emissions pathways for climate change and associated impacts in California. Based on climate projections from two state-of-the-art climat...

The magnitude of future climate change depends substantially on the greenhouse gas emission pathways we choose. Here we explore the implications of the highest and lowest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emissions pathways for climate change and associated impacts in California. Based on climate projections from two state-of-the-art climat...

This study analyzes alternatives to the Ebro interbasin transfer, the main project of the Spanish National Hydrological Plan. The Ebro transfer project has been prompted by pervasive pressures on water resources, acute water scarcity and the ensuing severe degradation of southeastern basins of the Iberian Peninsula. The focus of the analysis is on...

We link farmland values to climatic, soil, and socioeconomic variables for counties east of the 100th meridian, the historic boundary of agriculture not primarily dependent on irrigation. Degree days, a non-linear transformation of the climatic variables suggested by agronomic experiments as more relevant to crop yield gives an improved fit and inc...

The COS study team undertook this research effort in order to construct a monetary measure of the total ex ante economic value for preventing a specified set of natural resource injuries. There are two standard (Hicksian) monetary welfare measures used by economists: minimum willingness to accept (WTA) compensation to voluntarily give up a good and...

This chapter describes section by section the wording, format, and sequence used in the main study survey instrument as well as the rationale underlying the key features of the final design. Unless otherwise indicated, all quoted text in this chapter is from the survey questionnaire itself and is presented in a different typeface. Any questionnaire...