I am involved in several projects related to the valuation of water quality improvements whose purpose is to provide more information and better methods for public agencies to evaluate the consequences of their water treatment strategies. This includes development of the Beneficial Use Values Database, an on-line relational database that provides information on the economic values of water in its different beneficial uses; household surveys of willingness to pay by California citizens to remove impairments to water quality in lakes, rivers, streams, coastal and estuarine areas; and surveys of beach recreation and water quality valuation in San Diego county.

Another current interest is in exploring ways to estimate shadow values of time and other scarce resources for people based on their behavior and on their responses to surveys. The theory of consumer choice subject to multiple binding constraints provides structure that can be used in estimating shadow value functions jointly with behavior or other relationships. Working with students and colleagues, we have applied these approaches to joint estimation of shadow values of time with recreation demand and with willingness to pay responses, and to estimation of shadow values of grain and willingness to pay responses. More recently, we have shown how multiple shadow values for different activities can be estimated for an individual, based on fairly straightforward survey data.

A third main interest is in fisheries management and policy, which has grown out of my recent service on the Scientific and Statistical Committee of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. With students and colleagues, we have been estimating revenue functions, shadow values on catch and bycatch allocations, and allocation, and capacity measures for North Pacific groundfish fisheries. One issue I'm currently exploring is the precision of net benefits estimates that can be provided in benefit-cost analyses that draw key parameters from other studies in the literature.

Proceedings from the Workshop on Cooperative Regional Wildlife Management in Southern Africa.

Check out the Beneficial Use Values Database, a compilation of economic values of beneficial uses of water from the literature.