Burying Evidence\u27s Dead Hand

When the Rhode Island Rules of Evidence were adopted, they displaced all inconsistent case law existing at the time. Though the Rules retain a great deal of the evidence practice that preceded them, there is much in evidence practice that changed with their adoption. Rhode Island courts have consistently applied Rule 403 in a manner that comports with practice as it existed before the enactment of the Rhode Island Rules of Evidence. That practice, though, is inconsistent with the plain language of the Rule. These doctrines must be discarded

Experience, Expectations and Hindsight: Evidence of a Cognitive Wedge in Stated Preference Retrospectives

This paper combines fishing trip decisions - made before observing trip outcomes - with responses to set of double-bounded dichotomous choice CV questions regarding the outcome of the trip, to explore cognitive elements of choice and their implications for decision modeling and welfare analysis. Extending the approach taken by McConnell et al. (1999), wherein the unobserved component of random utility is linked between the trip decision and the retrospective trip evaluation, we decompose the unobserved component into linked and independent elements, and make the linked component a function of cognitive factors hypothesized as affecting differences between the RP and SP responses. Results suggest that a significant "wedge" exists between the closely related trip decision and its retrospective valuation, and that this wedge is not fully explained by factors such as experience, recall, and unobserved time costs.

Valuing a Spatially Variable Environmental Resource: Reducing Non-point Source Pollution in Green Bay, WI

This article investigates the value of reducing non-point source pollution in Green Bay, WI. Using stated preference methods, we find the lower bound on the benefits of reducing runoff enough to universally increase water clarity by four feet is greater than $9 million annually. Using a unique survey design, we show that because current water clarity in Green Bay is spatially variable, the value that a household places on this universal improvement depends on the distance of the household's residence from the Bay and on the particular geospatial location of the residence. This has important implications for estimating aggregate benefits.

The Dynamic Behavior of Efficient Timber Prices

The problem of when to optimally harvest trees when timber prices evolve according to an exogenous stochastic process has been studied extensively in recent decades. However, little attention has been given to the appropriate form of the stochastic process for timber prices, despite the fact that the choice of a process has important effects on optimal harvesting decisions. We develop a simple theoretical model of a timber market and show that there exists a rational expectations equilibrium in which prices evolve according to a stationary ARMA(1,1) process. Simulations are used to analyze a model with a more general representation of timber stock dynamics and to demonstrate that the unconditional distribution for rational timber prices is asymmetric. Implications for the optimal harvesting literature are: 1) market efficiency provides little justification for random walk prices, 2) unit root tests, used to analyze the informational efficiency of timber markets, do not distinguish between efficient and inefficient markets, and 3) failure to recognize asymmetric disturbances in time-series analyses of historical timber prices can lead to sub-optimal harvesting rules.

Effects of Environmental Zoning on Household Sorting: Empirical Evidence and Ecological Implications

In this paper we present a preliminary analysis of whether and how spatial variation in environmental attributes affects the residential sorting of households with heterogeneous preferences. An important implication of such sorting arises if variation in preferences over environmental attributes is correlated with household activities affecting the local ecosystem, such as the replacement of native vegetation with lawns, and the removal of course woody habitat from a lake. In this case the sorting process may engender differential evolution of local ecosystems (lakes) with the same initial ecological state. The model examined in the paper has the potential to statistically examine this issue, and therefore holds promise for understanding the behavioral implications of land use policies designed to protect local ecosystems. By facilitating the grouping of different types of households onto different lakes, for instance, lakeshore zoning policies may engender differentiation in the ecological evolution of lakes beyond what would be expected from the zoning policies themselves.Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use,