Estimating Option Values And Spillover Damages For Coastal Protection: Evidence From Oregon’S Planning Goal 18 Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists

Estimating nonmarket benefits for erosion protection can help inform better decision making and policies for communities to adapt to climate change. We estimate private values for a coastal protection option in an empirical setting subject to irreversible loss from coastal erosion and a land-use policy that provides identifying variation in the parcel-level option to invest in protection. Using postmatching regressions and accounting for potential spillovers, we find evidence that the value of the erosion protection option is between 13% and 22% of land price for parcels vulnerable to coastal hazards, implying that owners of oceanfront parcels have a subjective annual probability that they will experience an irreversible loss absent the option to protect between 0.7% and 1.3%. We also find that, because of altered shoreline wave dynamics, a parcel with a private protection option generates a spillover effect on protection-ineligible neighbors, lowering the value of neighboring land by 8%. Grant no. NA11OAR4320091A Grant no. NA16OAR4320152 Grant no. NA18OAR170072