NBER Publications by H. Allen Klaiber

This paper proposes the use of consumers’ preferences in formulating policies for keeping secret information about terrorist activities and threats that might compromise future security. We report the results from two surveys indicating that people have clear preferences for full disclosure of some terrorist related information regardless of its consequences for specific industries or future threats. This result is especially clear for threats involving commercial airlines. For those threats associated with more general surveillance or threats to the financial system respondents were more willing to allow government authorities to withhold information.

The importance of increments to an existing highway system depends upon their contributions to the accessibility provided by the existing network. Nearly 40 years ago, Mohring [1965] suggested this logic for planning optimal highway investment programs. He argued it could be implemented by measuring the quasi-rents generated by specific additions to an existing roadway system. This paper uses a unique set of additions to a loop roadway in metropolitan Phoenix, together with detailed records of housing sales over the past decade, to meet this need. We find that estimated increases in capitalized housing values due to four segments added during this period range from 73 to over 273 million dollars per mile of the roadway addition.

This paper outlines a new framework for gauging the properties of quasi-experimental estimates of the willingness to pay (WTP) for changes in environmental and other non-market amenities. As a rule, quasi-experimental methods cannot offer alternative hypotheses to judge the quality of their quasi random assignments of treatment and control outcomes to economic agents. Their results must be judged by the explanation of the event used to construct the assignment and the counter examples offered as robustness checks for the logic of each application. This paper develops a four-step procedure for situations that rely on housing price capitalization. It is a computational analog to Chetty's [2009] call for considering the measurement objectives as part of evaluating the relevance of reduced ve...