Lynne Lewis Bennett

Valuing Open Space and Land-Use Patterns in Urban Watersheds

This article presents the results of a hedonic property value analysis for an urban watershed in New Haven County, Connecticut. We use spatially referenced housing and land-use data to capture the effect of environmental variables around the house location. We calculate and incorporate data on open space, land-use diversity, and other environmental variables to capture spatial variation in environmental quality around each house location. We are ultimately interested in determining whether variables that are reflective of spatial diversity do a better job of describing human preferences for housing choice than broad categories of rural versus urban areas. Using a rich data set of over 4,000 houses, we study these effects within a watershed that includes areas of high environmental quality and low environmental quality as well as varying patterns of socioeconomic conditions. Our results suggest that, in addition to structural characteristics, variables describing neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics and variables describing land use and environmental quality are influential in determining human values. We also find that the scale at which we measure these spatially defined environmental variables is important.

Facilitating International Agreements Through an Interconnected Game Approach: The Case of River Basins

International rivers are a substantial source of the world’s freshwater supply. The resulting interdependence between nations leads to resource conflicts as upstream nations impose water quantity and quality externalities on downstream countries. As examples of international externalities, these conflicts can be analyzed using game theory. We show, however, that the predominantly unidirectional nature of these externalities produces an unsatisfactory “victim pays” outcome under a traditional game theory approach wherein the downstream country may need to bribe the upstream country into sharing water or improving water quality. Recognizing that nations in weak negotiating positions often try to improve their leverage by linking issues, we recommend using the interconnected game modeling approach for international rivers. To this end, we present two prospective case study examples of how the interconnected game can model issue linkages. The first is a study of tensions over a shared basin in Central Asia. The second is a study of shared water in the Euphrates and Orontes River Basins in the Middle East. An important innovation of the interconnected game is that it can generate outcomes that cannot be obtained when issues are modeled independently.

The interstate river compact: Incentives for noncompliance

Twenty-one western United States rivers are governed by interstate compacts. This paper examines the issue of compliance with interstate river compacts in the western United States and some of the factors influencing compact compliance. Theoretical arguments and empirical evidence presented in this paper suggest that upper basin states governed by interstate compacts with percentage delivery rules are more likely to comply with compact requirements than states whose rivers are governed by fixed delivery rules. Evidence indicates that both the frequency and level of noncompliance tend to be larger under a fixed allocation rule. Under such a rule the upper basin state bears a greater share of a shortage and experiences greater variability so it would have a greater incentive to cheat. A comparative study of the South Platte and La Plata Rivers is consistent with this hypothesis. Given the large demands imposed on many western United States rivers, our analysis suggests that compliance analysis is likely to be an important component of interstate negotiations and that administration of interstate compacts will become increasingly important.

The Interstate River Compact as a Water Allocation Mechanism: Efficiency Aspects

Interstate river compacts are widely used to allocate water among riparian states. Twenty-one compacts are currently in force in the western United States, and these compacts are mostly of two types: those that allocate a fixed amount or flow of water to individual states; and those that allocate percentages of available water to the riparian states. This study compares the performance of the two resulting allocations with that resulting from basin-wide optimization without compact constraints. While widely varying hydrologic and economic characteristics of river basins create a large set of possible outcomes, a range of stylized case studies indicates that percentage compacts are likely to generate greater net benefits and to result in more equitable risk-sharing than fixed compacts under many circumstances. In light of recent compact negotiations in the southeastern United States, it is recommended that efficiency analyses under present and future conditions be made a part of all compact negotiations. Copyright 2000, Oxford University Press.

Global warming and water management : Water allocation and project evaluation

This paper explores the sensitivity of the benefits of alternative water allocation schemes and of project evaluation to global warming. If global warming shifts the mean of annual water supplies, there could be large impacts on the expected values of alternative water allocation schemes. The first section of the paper explores how well alternative schemes (such as market mechanisms, prior rights, or percentage flows) perform if the distribution of flows changes. In a case study of the Colorado River, market mechanisms and flow guarantees result in smaller impacts than rules which allocate inefficient percentages of flows to heterogeneous users. The second part of the paper explores the effect of a gradually changing distribution of flows on project evaluations. Project evaluation is sensitive to predicted future changes in mean flows. Project evaluation is not sensitive to changes in the variance of future flows unless the variance increase is large and the benefit measure is highly curvilinear. Because basin-specific changes in runoff from global warming are currently uncertain and much delayed, most project analyses will be unaffected by global warming. The most important response by water managers to climate change may simply be to closely monitor runoff and incorporate flexible rules in order to adapt their behavior to observed changes.

Cost‐effective control of nitrogen loadings in Long Island Sound

Long Island Sound is plagued by conditions of severe hypoxia (low levels of dissolved oxygen) during the summer months because of the existence of excessive amounts of nitrogen. A new proposal that would allow sewage treatment plants to buy or sell nitrogen discharge credits is currently being evaluated by the states of Connecticut and New York. Existing theory suggests that a trading program for nitrogen emissions would be a cost-effective means of addressing the problem. We estimate the costs associated with several trading scenarios and find that the potential for cost savings is substantial and that cost savings rise as the scope of trading expands.

Design and Analysis of Contingent Valuation Surveys Using the Nested Tobit Model

Contingent valuation surveys have become an important tool in placing monetary values on non-market goods and amenities. Many policy issues involve evaluation of several alternatives such as different environmental quality levels, different levels of risk, etc. Contingent valuation then involves asking the respondent a sequence of nested questions. Asking and analyzing a nested sequence of questions is an efficient approach to data gathering and preference revelation. The resultant sequentially censored data set cannot be efficiently analyzed with the standard regression models like the Tobit or nested logit models. The nested Tobit model is proposed as an efficient and consistent method of estimating regressions using sequentially censored data. An empirical application suggests greater efficiency in comparison to the Heckman two-stage procedure. Copyright 1994 by MIT Press.