Government funding of the arts has received considerable attention in the United States in recent years. Efforts to cut funding to the National Endowment for the Arts and declining budgets for state arts agencies have raised questions about how much individuals value the arts. This paper applies the contingent valuation method to assess this value, using surveys of random households and of arts...

Although the contingent valuation method has been widely used to value a diverse array of nonmarket environmental and natural resource commodities, recent empirical evidence suggests that it may not accurately estimate real economic values. The hypothetical nature of environmental valuation surveys typically results in responses that are significantly greater than actual payments. Economists ha...

In recent decades, concerns have arisen about the proper valuation of the world’s forests. While some of these concerns have to do with market distortions for timber products or inadequate data on non-timber forest products, an additional challenge is to uncover the economic worth of nonmarket services provided by forest ecosystems (Kramer et al. 1997). This has led to a growing number of publi...