TY  - JOUR
AU  - Evans, Mary F
AU  - Poulos, Christine
AU  - Smith, V. Kerry
TI  - Who Counts in Evaluating the Effects of Air Pollution Policies on Households? Non-Market Valuation in the Presence of Dependencies
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15366
PY  - 2009
Y2  - September 2009
DO  - 10.3386/w15366
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15366
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15366.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Mary F. Evans
The Robert Day School
of Economics and Finance
Claremont McKenna College
500 E. Ninth Street
Claremont, CA 91711
E-Mail: Mary.Evans@ClaremontMcKenna.edu

Christine Poulos
RTI International
Public Health and Environment Division
Research Triangle Park, N.C.
E-Mail: cpoulos@rti.org

V. Kerry Smith
Department of Economics
W.P. Carey School of Business
P.O. Box  879801
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-9801
Tel: 480-595-2321
E-Mail: kerry.smith@asu.edu
AB  - Individuals who are likely to realize the largest benefits from improvements in air quality often depend on other members of their households to make time or monetary contributions to their care.  The presence of these dependency relationships among household members poses challenges for benefit estimation since it is unlikely that the conditions necessary for recovering the underlying individual preferences from household choices are satisfied in this setting.  We propose a conceptual framework that highlights the role of these dependencies in the choice models used to estimate the willingness to pay for environmental quality improvements.  We design a complementary stated preference survey that describes hypothetical dependency relationships for household members of different ages to test the implications of our conceptual model.  Respondents' choices take into account the care-giving responsibilities for young children and teenagers but not for older adults.
ER  -