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If the survival function of a random variable X lies to the right of the survival function of a random variable Y, then X is said to stochastically dominate Y. Inferring stochastic dominance is particularly complicated because comparing survival functions raises four possible hypotheses: identical survival functions, dominance of X over Y, dominance of Y over X, or crossing survival functions. In this paper, we suggest four-decision tests for stochastic dominance suitable for paired samples. The tests are permutation-based and do not rely on distributional assumptions. One-sided Cramér–von Mises and Kolmogorov–Smirnov statistics are employed but the general idea may be utilized with other test statistics. The power to detect dominance and the different types of wrong decisions are investigated in an extensive simulation study. The proposed tests are applied to data from an experiment concerning the individual’s willingness to pay for a given environmental improvement.

Using data from a survey of households in 11 OECD countries, this paper investigates the determinants of preferences for a completely green residential electricity system. Three important questions are addressed: (i) how much are households willing to pay to use only renewable energy? (ii) does willingness-to-pay (WTP) vary significantly across household groups and countries? and (iii) what drives the decision to enter the (hypothetical) market for green energy and, given entry, what drives the level of WTP? The analysis here differs from previous studies on green energy in two ways: first, data and analyses are comparable across countries and second, a comprehensive attempt is made to understand 0 WTP, and to accommodate-using a censored quantile regression (CQR) framework-unobserved heterogeneity. The survey data indicate a low WTP, at 11-12 % of current electric bill. This study also addresses a key question: how important is income for understanding WTP, relative to more "attitudinal" determinants? The effect of income overall appears ambiguous, with Tobit-like models indicating that income is not significant while the CQR indicates that income exerts a significant effect near the center of the distribution of WTP. Across all frameworks used, a key determinant of WTP appears to be environmental attitudes, particularly membership in an environmental organization.

This paper makes a contribution towards the statistical analysis of data sets containing intervals, that naturally arises in survey contexts. The suggested approach is sufficiently general to cover most cases where interval data are used. Interval data appear in many contexts, such as in reliability studies and survival analysis, in medicine and economics, in opinion elicit surveys, etc. There are several reasons for the extensive use of interval data, perhaps, the most common being one of necessity; exact values of the underlying observations are censored. The nature of the intervals analyzed here is somewhat unusual. The self-selected intervals (SeSeI) are (freely) chosen by the subjects. A generalization of the influential approach has been suggested to the statistical analysis of general censoring introduced by B. W. Turnbull. A key independence assumption in Turnbull's analysis has been explained and generalized. A sampling stopping rule based on the coverage probability has been suggested and the properties of a two-step estimator, based on the idea of asking two questions, where the second involves a way of fine-graining the information, has been discussed. This paper provides several informatics methods for SeSeI, targeting the problem of partial nonparametric identification. The properties of the suggested statistical models are stated, including a recursion for easy numerical calculations. An extensive simulation study, displaying, inter alia, the usefulness of the proposed resampling methods for the situation under study, completes the paper.

This paper is based on two national contingent valuation studies dealing with the extent and economic values of hunting in Sweden. The first valuation study was conducted in 1987 and the second in 2006. Both the game resource and the hunter community have undergone changes in the two decades covered by the surveys. An important purpose of the latter survey was to repeat relevant parts of the former one, which created a rare opportunity to compare valuations covering a very long time span. Moose hunting value and its determinants were compared between the two studies, showing that significant changes have taken place. Our analysis suggests caution in using results from old contingent valuation studies for e.g. benefits transfer exercises.

This paper is devoted to some important welfare economic issues related to natural disasters, in particular those connected with floods and storms. Our analysis of the social cost of a natural disaster is different from (most) existing analyses, in that we focus sharply on the welfare effects of a disaster. We derive a simple dynamic general equilibrium cost-benefit rule, which captures loss in production of private and public goods, as well as the value of (statistical) lives lost; it also clarifies the role played by changes in stocks and flows, respectively. Standard analysis of losses typically only includes damages to market-priced stocks and flows, thus our model paints a different picture of social cost. This difference is particularly striking for disaster that results in many deaths, but has relatively low (reported) costs. We take our model to the data by using EM-DAT, one of the several prominent databases in this literature, focusing on water-related disasters in the US.

In 2012 the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency was provided with 100,000 ha of productive forest land. The Agency swapped the land to obtain conservation-worthy forests, and these were turned into natural reserves. Conservation without reference to both benefits and cost typically results in inefficient solutions. In this paper we discuss how to select the forest stands to preserve in a cost-effective manner. We also discuss how to design a cost-benefit analysis of the swapping program. We provide several new results regarding the economics of preservation, when land swaps is a viable instrument.