Browsing by Author "Iverson, Terry, committee member"

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Open Access
Analyzing the impact of Hurricane Matthew on the housing market in Savannah Georgia
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Wrigley, Adam, author; Hill, Alexandra, advisor; Suter, Jordan, advisor; Iverson, Terry, committee member
This study seeks to shed light on the relationship between destructive hurricanes and public belief in the increasing risk to homeownership from these storms as climate change progresses. We investigate the impact of Hurricane Matthew on transaction prices of properties in the city of Savannah, Georgia because it is an example of a natural disaster which was unique in severity for its era but is characteristic of storms which will become more common with warmer oceans and higher sea levels (IPPC 2021). Hurricane Matthew made landfall in 2016. It was the first category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic since 2007 and occurred late in the season relative to previous hurricanes in the area. We use a hedonic modeling approach to shed light on the perceived risk and vulnerability of owning low elevation real estate by comparing property prices before and after the hurricane. We do this to speculate on whether the impact of a single storm can noticeably change the behavior of market participants in a location. Within our hedonic modeling framework, we employ several econometric specifications including a difference-in-difference regression, an event study model, and a repeated sales model. Our findings indicate that homebuyers were willing to pay a premium for more protected homes, i.e. higher elevation homes, compared with less protected homes, i.e. lower elevation homes, in the two years after the storm. This changing preference for relatively safer homes within a county, at the expense of the amenities available to the low elevation homes such as ocean views, is consistent with increased belief in the immediate dangers of climate change following a destructive event.
Open Access
Inventing in an uncertain world: biofuel patents and the anticommons
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Berklund, Annabelle, author; Weiler, Stephan, advisor; Kling, Robert, committee member; Iverson, Terry, committee member; Graff, Gregory, committee member
In 1998 Heller coined the term "anticommons" as a situation in which overlapping property rights lead to underutilization of a resource. Biofuel technologies offer a unique opportunity to explore Heller's hypothesis as there are a dozen different pathways all leading to the same end: a marketable fuel. Ethanol is the most common biofuel on the market today, but this first-generation biofuel comes at a high environmental cost. Advanced biofuels use non-food crops and other waste materials to create a final fuel, which offers hope when considering the environmental impacts of traditional liquid fuels. The patent rights surrounding each fuel type span from a single owner to many owners and vary across technology pathways. These papers explore biofuel technologies over 60 years via granted patents and show that along all technology and ownership patterns the number of assignees on a patent negatively impact follow-on citations. Paper 1, "The rise and fall of innovation in biofuels" was published in Nature Biotechnology in 2016. This paper is a patent landscape of biofuel technologies from 1960 to 2013. In this paper we show an uptick in biofuel patents in the early 2000's, followed by a slow-down post 2008. These trends vary by location and ownership structure, which is explored further in paper 3. Paper 2 builds on the traditional Nordhaus innovation model in which innovation outputs are a function of inputs. The model is expanded to include the potential for fragmented property rights in the form of diffuse patent ownership. The success of an innovation depends on basic research inputs, such as resources available to the researcher and existing patents for the technology in question. A hopeful inventor must consider the time and cost of negotiating rights to gain access to existing patents. And the risk of getting tied up in litigation, before deciding to move forward with a particular idea. As patent ownership becomes more diffuse private outcomes decrease relative to the social optimum and useful ideas are abandoned. Paper 3 uses the data from paper 1 to test the hypothesis of the anticommons empirically. The model uses count of citing patents as a function of various innovation inputs, including cited patents, inventor and assignee counts, time, and other control variables. The data is divided into technological pathways to illustrate how varying amounts of patent assignees impacts follow-on inventions. In all cases the number of assignees negatively impacts the number of follow on citations, suggesting the anticommons is present.
Open Access
Regulatory drift and path dependence in distributed generation policies across US states
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Crew, Seth, author; Duffy, Robert, advisor; Hitt, Matthew, advisor; Davis, Charles, committee member; Iverson, Terry, committee member
At this moment in the technological transition toward clean energy resources, two related strands of social science research deserve further empirical study: (1) the drivers of policy change, or alternatively, the factors that inhibit comprehensive policy change, and (2) the politics surrounding the regulation of clean energy technologies. Regarding the latter, this study is particularly interested in regulatory frameworks governing small-scale systems located close to the point of electricity consumption, or distributed generation systems, or DGs. Much of the political science and energy policy literature examines the drivers of policy change for renewable technologies writ large, but fewer studies have taken a focused approach on the policy mechanisms to drive adoption of renewable technologies specifically within small- and mid-size markets for residential and commercial properties. Because the regulatory environment for DGs is largely shaped by state policymakers, this research seeks to understand the sources of institutional resistance toward policies that would expand DG deployment at the state level. Two concepts in the political science and public policy literature potentially explain resistance toward updating regulatory frameworks to facilitate the technological transition. The first is path dependence, which explains how institutions become locked-in to outdated technologies due to increasing returns. The second is policy or regulatory drift, which illustrates how institutions avoid comprehensive change and remain stuck using regulatory structures that become inadequate for addressing social and environmental risk as circumstances evolve. This dissertation is focused on the following research question: what can explain the variance in path dependence and regulatory drift across states' regulatory regimes, specifically in DG integration policy? To answer this question, I conduct quantitative analyses of the association of political and economic variables with pro-DG policy outcomes across a seven-year period, from 2012 to 2018. Chapter Three analyzes the state policy environment using a quantitative index measure factoring in a series of DG integration policies, emphasizing net energy metering and interconnection standards. Chapter Four analyzes a similar set of political-economic and technical variables against the likelihood of pro-DG decisions from public utility commissions. The study finds some support for the hypothesis that path dependence and regulatory drift is occurring across states' DG policy environments, but the independent variables of interest – coal generation, utility market concentration, and power system characteristics – exert an uneven impact on DG policy outcome. Statistical relationships are conditional upon geographic region and electricity price and interpreting results across the two quantitative models is not clear-cut. This project contributes to our understanding of drift and path dependence in DG policy by providing a snapshot of the observable relationships between political-economic factors and regulatory favorability toward DG, and further research can utilize this project as a springboard to precisely identify the drivers of DG policy outcomes or discuss the role of drift in phases of technological change.
Open Access
The recreational value and social cost of national parks: an application of the travel cost method
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Lallement, Luc, author; Burkhardt, Jesse, advisor; Richardson, Leslie, committee member; Bayham, Jude, committee member; Iverson, Terry, committee member
Studies that value the natural resources and recreational opportunities of a National Park have been explored for some time. Of the myriad techniques used to determine these values, our study uses the Travel Cost Method (TCM) to estimate the consumer surplus (CS) value per-visit for several National Parks surveyed in 2022. Previous studies have typically been conducted for one site or region at a time. Our data is novel in that it contains survey results from five different National Parks as part of the first year of the Socioeconomic Monitoring Survey conducted by the National Park Service (NPS). The parks range in size, purpose, and popularity, and we examine heterogeneity in CS estimates across these differences. Many of our CS estimates are new to the TCM literature, and some provide an update to existing estimates. In addition, we use the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) to calculate the social cost of trips to the surveyed parks. These results are used to determine the total social cost of visitation, how costs would change if social costs were incorporated into the travel cost, and finally how visitation would change in this scenario. Our methodology builds on previous literature in the TCM space by incorporating econometric techniques to address multi-purpose visitors and on-site data collection. We find that our CS estimates are in line with previous TCM estimates. When social costs are incorporated, we estimate that there would be fewer visitors to the parks when social costs exceed an individual's estimated willingness to pay, if social costs were hypothetically incorporated via a carbon tax. Our study contributes to both the methodology of TCM studies and CS estimates of use-value for natural resources and can inform future authors on how to incorporate outside data (such as the SCC) to a well-established field. In addition, our estimates can be used by the NPS to inform policy decisions and benefit-cost analysis.
Open Access
Three essays on invasive species management and risk
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Chomphosy, William Haden, author; Weiler, Stephan, advisor; Shwiff, Stephanie, committee member; Anderson, Aaron, committee member; Iverson, Terry, committee member; Suter, Jordan, committee member
Invasive alien species (IAS) threaten global biodiversity, ecological services, and economic welfare. Over the past several decades, these growing consequences have seen broader analysis of the determinants and consequences of, as well as responses to, this environmental hazard. This dissertation employs theoretical and empirical tools, demonstrating the role of economics in the management of invasive species. The first and second chapters analyze the effect of research investment as a component of management strategy for IAS population reduction using a continuous time dynamic optimization model. Chapter 3 exploits the historical occurrence of World War I and its impact on international trade to study invasive species risk as a global externality of military conflict and geopolitical institutional shift.