Valuing historic battlefields: an application of the travel cost method to three American Civil War battlefields

摘要

This paper presents individual demand models for three historic battlefield sites maintained by the US National Park Service. Preserved battlefields are valuable cultural resources that make up a significant portion of the US National Park system, but have received scant attention from economists. The demand for trips is modeled as a count data process. Visitor data for these battlefields were collected on-site, so the models account for truncation in the observed number of trips and endogenous stratification. The travel cost method, which is seeing increasing application in cultural heritage research, is used to estimate the use value of each battlefield. The results indicate an average individual willingness to pay for a battlefield trip ranging from about $8-$25, depending on the site.