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 -