My Research

Natural resources provide valuable goods and services to people. They provide raw materials, food, energy and places where people can perform many kinds of recreation activities. Some of these services have an important value for recreationists. This however might not be apparent at first as access to them is not allocates through regular markets and therefore prices are not explicitly known. Recent estimates have hown that the U.S. population over 16 years old spends close to $179 billion a year in recreation activities (Phaneuf and Smith, 2004). In general, recreation consumption (as a percentage of disposable income) has been steadily increasing overtime. In fact, according to several studies, it has nearly doubled since 1988 (Phaneuf and Smith, 2004) rising from 3% to 6% by 1991.
With these figures the economic relevance of recreational services is undenuable.
My PhD Project
AAEA
Articles

Because of this economists have developed tools to help solve problem of the seemingly missing markets for recreation services and site characteristics to help with policy and management decisions.
This is precisely what keeps me busy. Finding more and better ways to apply these tools to deal with real world questions has been the focus of my research in recent years.
In this section I include some of my current research and some abstracts of things I am working with. If you need any further information on any topic covered here please feel free to
email me.
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Recreation Demand: Dealing with Heterogeneity in Site Visitors
Juan Marcos Gonzalez
Colorado State University


When estimating recreation demand, heterogeneity can be a problem if users are markedly different. Parameters for site characteristics might be affected by the distribution of unidentified groups in the visiting population for each site when demand is estimated. Not accounting for this possibility might overlook some mportant effects that site heterogeneity might have over our estimates...
more

Do CVM Welfare Estimates Suffer from Endogenous Stratification and Incidental Truncation: A Comparison of On Site and Household Visitor Surveys.
Juan Marcos Gonzalez and John B. Loomis
Colorado State University


In 1998 Shaw proposed a statistical correction to the Travel Cost Model (TCM) to account for two important potential sources of bias when sampling on recreational sites; endogenous stratification and truncation. Economists have embraced the idea that this correction provides meaningful information and allows them to extend the model conclusions to the general population. Although this practice is very common for the TCM estimations, the idea has not been incorporated to Contingent Valuation Methods, commonly used by economists...
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Spatial Limits of the TCM Revisited: Island Effects
John B. Loomis*, Juan Marcos Gonzalez*, Armando Gonzalez-Caban^
*Colorado State University
^USDA Forest Service


The TCM relies upon the notion of a spatial market where visitors' willingness to trade travel costs for site visits reveals their willingness to pay (WTP) for the site and its characteristics. While past researc has focused on the assumptions of the TCM that distant visitors actually incur the travel cost exclusively to visit the site of interest (the so-called multiple destination trip bias problem), very little focused on the physical or natural spatial limits to the travel cost model...
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My Abstracts
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