Roger Coupal

The economic benefits of snowmobiling to Wyoming residents: a travel cost approach with market segmentation.

Little research has been done on the economic benefits of snowmobiling. This study uses cluster analysis to identify different snowmobiler segments, and then uses the travel cost method to estimate the respective consumer surplus values for the pooled sample and the different market segments. Consumer surplus per trip for the pooled sample is

Determining the Relationship between Urban Form and the Costs of Public Services

68 and for the different market segments ranged from

Estimating the Value of Additional Wind and Transmission Capacity in the Rocky Mountain West

31 to

ECONOMIC ISSUES AND POLICIES AFFECTING RECLAMATION IN WYOMING'S OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY 1

101 per trip. Differences between the pooled model and segments highlight the importance of differentiating recreational users for both management related issues and for economic benefit measurements.

Economic Benefits of Sport Fishing and Angler Wildlife Watching in Pennsylvania: A Comment

Dispersed development is often associated with negative externalities and ensuing external costs. As a consequence, there is a global need for informed decision making on issues of land-use change and conversion that includes the influences of differing urban forms on the costs of public services. In this paper we quantify a relationship between cost of services and urban form through the development of an econometric model for the provision of public safety for a county in the Mountain West of the USA. The research extends previous modeling of public services to include a spatial index representing urban form, the pattern of the built environment disaggregated by land use, as an explanatory variable for input cost. The use of an index allows quantifying and tracking changes in urban form over time. The index is based on the Morans I measure of spatial autocorrelation. It is calculated using the dollar values of buildings aggregated spatially within grid cells. By leveraging Morans I, the index captures local and global statistics representing the intensity of the built environment by land-use category. Local Morans I statistics quantify the contribution of individual cells to overall clustering. Global Morans I statistics are suitable for inclusion as a spatial index in time series regression analysis. Results suggest residential development is a statistically significant driver of local government expenditures on inputs to policing services. This paper contributes to the literature on fiscal impact analysis by incorporating a measure of urban form as a determinant of local government expenditures on services and, ultimately, on the level of service provision. This provides a direct link between urban form and the cost of public services.

Planning Support Systems for Fiscally Sustainable Planning

The expansion of wind-generation in the United States poses significant challenges to policy-makers, particularly because winds intermittency and unpredictability can exacerbate problems of congestion on a transmission-constrained grid. Understanding these issues is necessary if optimal development of wind energy and transmission is to occur. This paper applies a model that integrates the special concerns of electricity generation to empirically consider the challenges of developing wind resources in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States. Given the lack the high frequency data needed to address the special problems of intermittency and congestion, our solution is to create a dispatch model of the region and to use simulations to generate the necessary data, then use this data to understand patterns that have occurred as wind resources have been developed.

The Impact of Residential Development Pattern on Wildland Fire Suppression Expenditures

This study examines economic issues that affect the decision to reclaim land disturbed by oil and gas development. We start with a discussion of the current reclamation bonding requirements in Wyoming, which are intended to insure the proper reclamation of disturbed land. Next, a simple economic framework is proposed for modeling reclamation decision making by oil and gas producers. The most important issue affecting the decision to reclaim is the cost of reclaiming the disturbed land; therefore, we use a dataset provided by the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to conduct a detailed analysis of reclamation costs for orphaned oil and gas wells. We also consider issues concerning the timing of reclamation costs and some environmental considerations. Finally, we discuss some deficiencies in the current bonding system, and offer some suggestions on how the current system could be improved in terms of providing more economic incentives for operators to fully reclaim disturbed lands.

Reclamation Costs and Regulation of Oil and Gas Development with Application to Wyoming

Upneja et al. (2001) stated correctly that benefit estimates beyond those generated by economic impact analyses are appropriate kinds of information for policymakers and resource managers. The authors’ concern is that Upneja et al.’s article could potentially encourage other travel professionals to estimate travel cost models that provide inaccurate or flawed economic benefit estimates. Problems include using price as the only variable in the demand equation, out-of-pocket travel expenses as a proxy for price, and linear regression instead of a count data process.

Off-Road Vehicle Recreation in the West: Implications of a Wyoming Analysis

Local government’s need for accurate assessments and projections of the fiscal consequences of development is well established and persistent. This analysis demonstrates the use of a geographic information science-based planning support system to project residential growth and the fiscal consequences of development. The cornerstone of the analysis is a spatial index of urban form which captures clustering and dispersion of the built environment. A regression model indicates the spatial index to be a statistically significant determinant of expenditures on policing services in the study area. Modelled future growth was spatially and temporally disaggregated to indicate future residential growth at different planning horizons. Spatial indices were calculated for these planning horizons and incorporated into the econometric model for ceteris paribus evaluation of the effect of change in urban form on public service expenditures. Results demonstrate planning informed by PSS modelling has the potential to realize savings on public service expenditures.

Infrastructure Development, Residential Growth and Impacts on Public Service Expenditure

Despite a growing body of literature on the economics of wildland fire suppression, the effect of development pattern in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) has received only cursory treatment. We model the relationship between fire suppression expenditures and the spatial pattern of residential development using data from 281 fires in the northern Rocky Mountains. We find that the effect of WUI development on suppression expenditures is dependent on the spatial pattern of development. Our results suggest that policies to control the spatial pattern of WUI development can be nearly as effective as policies that completely restrict WUI development. (JEL C51, Q23)