Willingness to Pay for Land Preservation Across States and Jurisdictional Scale: Implications for Benefit Transfer

In stated preference valuation of farmland preservation, respondents are often told that preservation will occur within a given jurisdictional scale—e.g., community, state, county—but do not know the specific location of parcels in question. Hence, welfare estimates may be available for different scales and/or states, providing numerous avenues for benefit transfer. This paper provides a systematic assessment of transfer error, contrasting different methods for the transfer of farmland preservation values across states and jurisdictional scales. Empirical results drawn from multi-state choice experiments suggest that the choice of across-scale versus acrossstate transfer method can have critical implications for transfer validity. RUNNING TITLE Land Preservation Benefit Transfer