Suchergebnisse

Wetlands provide a variety of important environmental services including flood control, wildlife habitat, waste treatment, and recreational opportunities. Because most of these services are public goods, the value of wetland preservation cannot be directly obtained from market prices but may be estimated using revealed-preference or stated-preference methods. We estimate the value to local residents of protecting the Kuantu wetland in Taiwan using contingent valuation. Estimates are sensitive to question format, with estimates using a double-bounded dichotomous-choice format about three times larger than estimates using a single open-ended question. Using the open-ended format, the estimated annual mean household willingness to pay to preserve
the Kuantu wetland is about US$21. Using the dichotomous-choice questions, the
value is about US$65. These estimates suggest the total present-value willingness to pay to preserve Kuantu wetland is about US$200 million to US$1.2 billion (discounted at 5–10%).

In 1968, the Taiwanese government extended compulsory education from six to nine years and opened over 150 new junior high schools at a differential rate among regions. Within each region, we exploit variations across cohorts in new junior high school openings to construct an instrument for schooling and employ it to estimate the causal effects of mother's or father's schooling on infant birth outcomes in the years 1978–1999. Parents' schooling does indeed cause favorable infant health outcomes. The increase in schooling associated with the reform saved almost 1 infant life in 1,000 live births. "The one social factor that researchers agree is consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It is more important than race; it obliterates any effects of income." Gina Kolata, "A Surprising Secret to Long Life: Stay in School,"New York Times, January 3, 2007, p. 1.

ABSTRACTThis paper uses propensity score matching techniques and ordinary least square regressions to examine the relationship between exporting and productivity growth in the Taiwan electronics industry. Using data from three census years, we find that plants with higher productivity growth tend to enter the export market, supporting the self‐selection mechanism. The evidence of learning‐by‐exporting is mixed, however. While the plants exporting throughout the sample period show small differences in productivity growth from non‐exporters in the downturn period, continuing exporters outperform non‐exporters in the upturn period. Thus, our results suggest that the direction of causality mainly runs from productivity to exporting rather than vice versa.