Research

Use-values of nonmarket environmental amenities are often elicited by studying the demand for outdoor recreation. Credible value estimates are important to be able to implement efficient policies affecting the supply of such goods. In this paper, we use a sharp increase in electricity prices in Norway resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as a natural experiment to study the price sensitivity of outdoor recreation demand. We use GPS-based data from the training app Strava, spatially merged with the locations of cabins, and estimate a 15% decline in cabin-based outdoor recreation following the price shock. From this, we calculate that an average cabin owner has a consumer surplus of approximately $6,000 per year, equivalent to about $204 per use-day. We furthermore estimate a price elasticity of –0.24, indicating inelastic demand. These findings suggest considerable welfare benefits from cabin recreation. Our study contributes to the growing literature on taking causal inference techniques and new observational data sources to the field of valuation of nonmarket environmental amenities.

We use linked employer-employee data linked with firm-level emissions data to explore the relationship between well-established measures of firm quality and emissions. We explore whether the firms that yield the highest utility are also firms that emit less. We investigate the causal link by exploring events in the data, looking at firms experiencing a sudden increase in emissions. This allows us to study worker turnover around these events and the willingness to pay for a sustainable employer.