Robert W. Turner

Managing Multiple Activities in a National Park

This paper uses the theory of club goods to derive efficiency conditions for managing multiple activities in a national park. The park jointly provides recreational activities for visitors and wilderness, a pure public good. The implications for user fees, self-financing of the park, and prohibition of particular activites are derived. Separate tolls should be charged for each activity; with efficient activity tolls, no entrance fee is needed. Glacier National Park is used to show that, in order to apply the theoretical rules, park managers need more information than is currently available.

Market Failures and the Rationale for National Parks

Abstract Americas national park system is widely admired, but the economic rationale for national parks is not compelling. The author discusses how market failures of various kinds can, in principle, be used to justify national parks. The best rationale for national parks is based on existence or nonuse values rather than on their recreational aspects. The author also shows that more evidence, especially regarding the costs of providing and operating parks and the magnitude of nonuse values, needs to be gathered before the case for national parks becomes compelling. Although this evidence will be difficult to obtain, it is hard to give an economic rationale for national parks without it.

Taxes and the number of fringe benefits received

Abstract Discussion about tax policy towards fringe benefits has often assumed that taxing benefits would cause a large change in the composition of employee compensation. Previous evidence, though, indicates that changes in marginal tax rates do not have a large effect on expenditures on major fringe benefits as a share of total compensation. This paper examines whether employees respond to higher tax rates by getting additional kinds of fringe benefits. The results suggest that the effect of tax rates on the probability of receiving additional fringe benefits is quite small.

The Optimal Provision of Services in National Parks

Abstract A national park provides recreational opportunities and also provides a pure public good. This paper presents an intergenerational model in which a club good and a pure public good are provided jointly. The focus is on optimality conditions for services provided by park managers. At the margin, the cost of providing the services should be balanced by the benefits of services. Services can directly enhance visitor enjoyment, both immediately and in the future; they can also affect congestion currently and in the future; they can affect the quality of park resources; and they can affect the pure public good provision. The framework developed in this paper suggests what information should be used by the National Park Service when deciding on the level and kind of services to provide.

Estimating covariances of parameter estimates from different models

Abstract This note presents a technique for estimating the covariances of parameter estimates from different models. This technique is useful for hypothesis testing for a non-linear function of the parameter estimates from different models with correlated observations.

Using Contingent Choice Surveys to Inform National Park Management

Contingent choice surveys can provide national park managers rich information to help inform management decisions, but they have almost never been used in this context. The surveys can be integrated easily into multiple stages of the existing National Park Service planning process and can foster interdisciplinarity. They yield estimates of monetary and nonmonetary benefits created by park resources, including benefits derived from both recreation and preservation. Many alternative management scenarios can be explored efficiently. Recent innovations in the design and statistical analysis of contingent choice surveys have increased their accuracy and flexibility. This paper describes why contingent choice surveys are useful for park management and how they can fit into current management policies. It then describes contingent choice surveys and the econometric techniques used to analyze them, presenting two examples as illustrations.

Environmental art, prior knowledge about climate change, and carbon offsets

Using a contingent choice survey of US citizens, we investigate the influence of environmental art on individual willingness to purchase voluntary carbon offsets. In a split-sample experiment, we compare the stated preferences of survey respondents in two different treatment groups to the preferences of a control group. One treatment group is shown photographs that illustrate the impacts of climate change; the other is shown animated images that illustrate wind speeds and patterns for extreme weather events. While individuals seeing the photographs show a higher willingness to purchase voluntary offset than the control group, respondents seeing the animated images seem less willing to buy offsets. This result remains stable when accounting for preference heterogeneity related to prior knowledge about climate change issues. We hypothesize that the differential impacts of the two kinds of artistic images are due to a combination of factors influencing individual choices: emotional effect, cognitive interest, and preferences for the prevention of specific climate change impacts, as well as, more generally, internalized and social norms for the mitigation of climate change.

Valuation of Cultural and Natural Resources in North Cascades National Park: Results From a Tournament-Style Contingent Choice Survey

We present the results of a new, tournament-style design of a contingent choice survey about management options at North Cascades National Park (NCNP). In our tournament-style survey, each respondent explicitly ranks several sets of scenarios and, in addition, several other rankings are implicit. Inclusion of the implicit rankings leads to some differences in coefficient estimates but almost no differences in valuation measures. This suggests that the tournament-style format can increase the efficiency of estimates, although further investigation is needed. We find strong evidence of nonuse values for both cultural and natural resource protection; indeed, nonuse values seem to dominate preferences even for those who have visited NCNP. We further find that respondents in general seem to value the protection of natural resources more than the protection of cultural resources, although both are valuable.

Explaining the Determinants of Operating Budgets at U.S. National Parks

The authors use time-series, cross-section, and panel data sets to see whether U.S. National Park System operating budget appropriations are related to inflation, visitation, size, region of the country, and type of park unit. The growth rate of the aggregate National Park Service (NPS) budget seems to increase in response to higher congestion. But neither visitation growth nor growth in acreage seems to have much effect on budget growth for individual park units. Individual park units with higher visitation do seem to have larger budgets, ceteris paribus, than do parks with lower average visitation. Judging from the findings, future research should try to explain differences among the several types of park units in the NPS as well as explaining why visitation and park size have small effects for individual park units but seem to have larger effects for the aggregate NPS operating budget.