This special issue of the journal Land Economics is the result of a 2019 workshop hosted by PERC that explored a range of outdoor recreation issues with a specific focus on funding.
PERC Senior Fellow Spencer Banzhaf directed the workshop and wrote an introduction to the Land Economics special issue that summarizes the collection of research papers.
The increased use of our public lands raises the question of how to finance them. General revenues, gate fees, and gear taxes are leading candidates, and each has characteristic strengths and weaknesses. Addressing these issues requires combining public finance and environmental economics as well as historical and institutional knowledge of how public lands are actually managed. The articles in this special issue of Land Economics creatively combine these forms of expertise to address the financing of public lands.
- “Financing Outdoor Recreation: An Introduction” by H. Spencer Banzhaf
- “Funding Public Goods Through Dedicated Taxes on Private Goods” by Nathan W. Chan and Matthew J. Kotchen
- “Bundling Private Complements to Finance Public Goods” by H. Spencer Banzhaf and V. Kerry Smith
- “Federal Funding and State Wildlife Conservation” by Dean Luek and Dominic P. Parker
- “Revenue and Distributional Consequences of Alternative Outdoor Recreation Pricing Mechanisms: Evidence from a Micropanel Data Set” by Tongjie Ji, David A. Keiser, Catherine L. Kling, and Daniel J. Phaneuf
- “How Does Congestion Affect the Evaluation of Recreational Gate Fees? An Application to Gulf Coast Beaches” by Roger H. von Haefen and Frank Lupi
- “Distributional Effects of Entry Fees and Taxation for Financing Public Beaches” by Frank Lupi, Roger H. von Haefen, and Li Cheng
- “Efficiency and Equity of an Outdoor Recreation Equipment Tax to Fund Public Lands” by Margaret Walls and Matthew Ashenfarb