Signs of climate change across the Pacific Northwest indicate changing patterns of timing and availability of stream flow. Declining summer low flows, decreasing snow pack, higher temperatures and an increasing fraction of mountain precipitation falling as rain, raise concerns about future reliability of stream flows. These changes will likely affect...
This dissertation consists of three essays on private landowners' response to incentives for carbon sequestration in forests. The first essay examines private landowner response to incentives for carbon sequestration through various combinations of intermediate management practices. The second essay focuses on agricultural landowners' willingness to participate in an incentive program...
China has experienced rapid economic growth in the last twenty years, accompanied by large-scale land conversion, severe environmental degradation, and rising carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. Designing policies for sustainable development requires a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between economic growth, land-use change, carbon sequestration and emissions in China. This dissertation...
To increase the knowledge needed to successfully implement the ecosystem-based approach to fishery management, this dissertation investigates important issues within the economics of choice and the economics of displacement. In particular, a discrete choice model of the fishing location decision in the Newport, Oregon bottom trawl groundfish fishery is estimated...
Wildlife managers are on the front lines of the effort to conserve wildlife and
are required to do so cost-effectively. This dissertation consists of three manuscripts
that integrate economics and ecology to inform cost-effective wildlife management.
The first and second manuscripts focus on identifying cost-effective wildlife
management plans. The third...
To protect and restore environmental quality, efficient and effective conservation policies are needed. Designing policies require a sound understanding of the contributions of natural endowments to economic vitality, and the performance and impacts of conservation programs. This dissertation consists of three essays, and addresses several issues relevant to these two...
It is essential to study the relationship between environmental features and human land-use activities that can provide a better understanding of human-environment interactions. In a response, this dissertation addresses the human-environment issues from different perspectives in three essays. The first essay conducts an integrated analysis to investigate the impacts of...
This dissertation used land rent theory and an economic model of land-use conversion to examine the main drivers of the deforestation occurred in Antioquia,Colombia, between 1980 and 2000. Land-cover information at a semi-fine scale (1:25,000)
obtained largely from aerial photography was employed to calculate deforestation. In addition, free international databases...
This paper presents a framework for analyzing efficient spatial allocation of forest
management efforts - fuel treatment and harvest - under the risk of fire. The framework
integrates a fire behavior model and a spatially-explicit stochastic dynamic optimization
model. I investigate the effects of spatial interaction across plots during forest...
This dissertation consists of three essays that evaluate various types of health care policies from the social welfare perspective. Chapter 1 introduces the main ideas and framework of this dissertation. Chapter 2 evaluates the new co-payment policy, enacted on July 15, 2005 under Taiwan’s National Health Insurance (NHI). We show...