Importance of forest attributes in the willingness to pay for recreation: a contingent valuation study of Irish forests

Data from a large-scale (over 8000) discrete choice contingent valuation study with a follow-up are used to investigate the effects of the hedonic equation for willingness to pay for access to forest recreation in Ireland. Selected forest descriptors for recreational quality show meaningful impacts and signs through a number of probit models, representing a gradient of restrictions gradually moving from the bivariate probit with heteroskedasticity to the interval data assumptions. Significance and magnitude of parameter estimates are found to be stable across the investigated models. This result supports the hypothesis that value estimates from contingent valuation methods exhibit theoretically consistent relationships with important forest attributes.