作者：Simpson, RD; Sedjo, RA; Reid, JW
摘要：''Biodiversity prospecting'' has been touted as a mechanism for both discovering new pharmaceutical products and saving endangered ecosystems. It is unclear what values may arise from such activities, however. Evidence from transactions is incomplete and existing theoretical models are flawed. We calculate an upper bound on the value of the ''marginal species.'' Even under favorable assumptions this bound is modest. Slightly modified assumptions lead to drastically lower estimates. We extend o...
作者：Subramanian, S; Deaton, A
作者单位：Princeton University
摘要：We investigate nutrition and expenditure in rural Maharashtra in India. We estimate that the elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to total expenditure is 0.3-0.5, a range that is in accord with conventional wisdom. The elasticity declines only slowly with levels of living and is far from the value of zero suggested by a recent revisionist literature. In these Indian data, the calories necessary for a day's activity cost less than 5 percent of the daily wage, which makes it implausibl...
