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Dissertation_Wei Chen4_final.pdf (3.57 MB)

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The Impacts of Environmental Changes on Individual Behaviors in Developing Countries

Chen, Wei
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2519-1504
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1563381714920736

Abstract Details

2019, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics.
This dissertation consists of three essays. All three essays explore how individuals make decisions in response to natural and man-made environmental changes in developing countries and how these individual behaviors lead to aggregate effects on the environment. In Chapter 2, I estimate the causal effect of municipal road expansion on Vehicle -Kilometers Traveled (VKT) in 103 Chinese cities while accounting for the potential for increased car adoption to affect VKT. A novel matching IV strategy is developed to address endogeneity concerns that complements previously used historical infrastructure instruments to provide time-varying identification in a panel data setting. I find that the estimated elasticity of VKT with respect to road length is approximately 1.1, indicating that newly built urban roads lead to a more than proportional increase in total traffic. Given large ongoing infrastructure investment combined with more recently enacted traffic alleviation policies in many Chinese cities, this result provides important new information on the potential impacts of infrastructure investment on traffic. In Chapter 3, I develop a novel compensating differential model of quality of life rankings with an agricultural sector. I introduce an additional farm income component into the household budget in the theoretical equilibrium system alongside housing and labor markets. I apply this model in a developing country, Indonesia, to examine the existence of compensating differentials and recover quality-of-life rankings for jurisdictions across the country at distinct time periods. To conduct the research, I use detailed household data from the fourth and fifth waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) fielded in 2007 and 2014 across 11 provinces in Indonesia. I estimate implicit prices for various amenities based on hedonic equations of housing rents, non-farm wages and agricultural returns. The results indicate that compensating differentials exist across the country and in particular the impacts of amenities on agriculture and the non-farm labor market are different. Moreover, I calculate the quality-of-life rankings for 192 districts (regencies and cities) in the 11 Indonesian provinces in 2007 and 2014, respectively. The significant changes between these two time periods imply that the gap in quality of life across the country has narrowed. In Chapter 4, I use citizen science eBird data to investigate the impact of deforestation on birdwatching ecotourism across Mexico. Utilizing detailed data on individual trips reported to eBird, I construct annual count data on visits to 1,810 Mexican municipalities from 2008 to 2016 to examine how changes in forests affect tourist visitation patterns. I find that an additional percentage point of deforestation reduces the probability of a municipality being visited by birders by 12.5% and decreases the number of birdwatching visit days by 29.4%. These results offer new insights into the impacts of deforestation on economic returns from the ecotourism industry and provide evidence that citizen science data perform well as a relatively untapped source of potentially valuable information on economic behavior in otherwise limited data settings.
Allen Klaiber (Advisor)
Daniela Miteva (Committee Member)
Sathya Gopalakrishnan (Committee Member)
141 p.
Economics; Environmental Economics
Vehicle-Kilometers Traveled; road infrastructure; compensating differentials; quality of life; deforestation; birdwatching ecotourism; developing countries

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Chen, W. (2019). The Impacts of Environmental Changes on Individual Behaviors in Developing Countries [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1563381714920736

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Chen, Wei. The Impacts of Environmental Changes on Individual Behaviors in Developing Countries. 2019. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1563381714920736.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Chen, Wei. "The Impacts of Environmental Changes on Individual Behaviors in Developing Countries." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1563381714920736

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1563381714920736
688
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.