Economic Studies on Wildlife Management and Conservation

The present research consists of four articles addressing wildlife management and conservation using different methodological approaches of applied economics. The thesis encompasses various economic analyses on three carnivore species mainly: the wolf (Canis lupus), the brown bear (Ursus arctos), and the lynx (Lynx lynx). Other wildlife species are also present to a relatively lesser extent: the moose (Alces alces), the roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), the wild boar (Sus scrofa), and the wolverine (Gulo gulo). The first three articles comprise applied analyses in Sweden, and the last article covers North America as well as Eurasia. The first article uses revealed preference methods to address the impact of large carnivores and licensed carnivore hunting on hunting rental prices in Sweden. The results suggest that regulated carnivore hunting exerts a statistically significant and positive effect on hunting lease prices whilst carnivore presence influences lease prices negatively. The analysis is performed using least absolute deviation estimations to minimize the effect of outliers. The second article expands the analysis of the first paper by implementing an unconditional quantile regression analysis. This methodological approach allows to study the effect of large carnivores over different segments of the hunting rental price distribution. The outcome confirms that carnivores reduce lease prices in the quantiles near the median, yet no significant impact is found for the lower quantiles. The third article introduces a spatial dimension in the analysis. It formulates a dynamic bioeconomic model to estimate the effects of carnivores and hunting pressure on game harvests in Sweden. A linearized version of the bioeconomic model is then estimated using dynamic spatial econometrics. The model accounts for spatial and temporal dimensions in order to explore spatial effects in game harvests and estimate the value of the impact of large carnivores on the harvest of ungulate game. The results elicit dynamic spatial spillovers in roe deer and wild boar harvests. Lynx presence and human hunting pressure reduce roe deer and wild boar harvests, respectively. The wolf and the brown bear decrease moose harvests, however moose does not exhibit spatial effects, seemingly due to Swedish hunting regulations for this particular species. The last article explores the implications of immediate emotions on group outcomes for conserving two carnivore species, the wolf and the wolverine. By conducting an online public goods experiment, the study examines the degree of cooperation across group participants after inducing positive and negative emotions with audio-visual stimuli. The results indicate that positive emotions seemingly enhance cooperative behavior for wolf conservation yet no corresponding evidence is found for the wolverine. Furthermore, for a given induced emotion, monetary contributions do not differ significantly across the two animal species