Do agents' characteristics affect their valuation of 'common pool' resources? A full-preference ranking analysis for the value of sustainable river basin management.

In this paper we develop a full-preference ranking Choice Experiment (CE) designed to investigate how respondents evaluate a set of proposed improvements towards sustainable river basin management, as per the prescriptions of the European Union-Water Framework Directive (2000). The CE is applied in the Asopos River Basin (ARB) in Greece. Our interest is to test whether residency in the river basin, or otherwise, affects the preferences of the relevant agents. We first estimate a rank-ordered logistic regression based on a full set of choices in order to calculate the willingness to pay (WTP) of respondents for each one of the three attributes considered in the CE (i.e., environmental conditions, impact on the local economy and changes in the potential uses of water). The model is initially estimated for the full sample and then re-estimated twice for two sub-samples: the first one only includes the residents of Athens and the second only includes the residents of Asopos. Afterwards, we examine the effect of various demographic and socio-economic factors (such as income, gender, age, employment and education) on the estimates of our model in order to reveal any differences among respondents with different characteristics, mainly focusing on whether they reside or have personal experience of the RB under valuation. Thus, our analysis simultaneously provides a robustness check on previous findings in the literature and additional information about how various demographic and socio-economic characteristics affect the evaluation of the selected attributes.

Cross-state disparities in US health care expenditures.

This study examines the degree of convergence in health care expenditures among the US states from 1980 to 2004. Our results suggest that the US states form two clubs with specific geographical characteristics that converge to different equilibria. We also extend our analysis to investigate the cross-state disparities in nine major components of health expenditures. Our findings provide evidence for full convergence for only two components, namely 'physician and other professional services' and 'home health care'. However, for the remaining components, we can still identify various convergence clubs.