econometric analysis Archives - An Economic View of the Environment

What’s in a Name? Wine, Economics, and Terroir

Today, I’m pleased to offer a temporary respite from analysis of climate change policy (and other environmental policies, for that matter), while remaining well within the general province of environmental and natural resource economics. I do this through a merger of profession and avocation, in my case, economics and oenonomy (the study – as well as the enjoyment – of fine wine).

A Blend of Economy and Oenonomy

As some readers may know, in addition to having served as the founding Editor (and current Co-Editor) of the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, I have had the distinct pleasure of being one of the founding Editors (along with Kym Anderson, Orley Ashenfelter, Victor Ginsburgh, and Karl Storchmann) of the Journal of Wine Economics. If you’re laughing, let me quickly note that the Journal consists of serious, refereed articles, many by leading economists, and has been referenced by the New York Times, The Economist, and The Financial Times. And – in what may be our high point or low point, depending upon your perspective – a discussion paper from the affiliated American Association of Wine Economists was referenced – and mocked – by Stephen Colbert on his “Colbert Report.”

A New Article

In an article that is forthcoming in the Journal of Wine Economics, Robin Cross, Andrew Plantinga (both of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Oregon State University), and I examine a concept that is central to the thinking of wine geeks around the world – terroir. The Journal article – “The Value of Terroir: Hedonic Estimation of Vineyard Sale Prices” – has not yet been published, but a brief version of our analysis – “What is the Value of Terroir?” – has just been published in the American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 2011, and so I’m pleased to provide an even briefer summary here (quoting and paraphrasing from our AER P&P article) – both for wine geeks and for others. First, however, let me acknowledge Chuck Mason and other participants in a session at the 2011 American Economic Association meetings for having offered helpful comments on a previous version of the paper. Now, to the subject at hand.

Some Background

Wine producers and enthusiasts use the term “terroir,” from the French terre (meaning land), to refer to the special characteristics of a place that impart unique qualities to the wine produced. The Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) system in France, and similar systems adopted in other wine-producing countries, are based upon the geographic location of grape production, predicated on this notion of terroir. Under the U.S. system, production regions are designated as American Viticultural Areas (AVAs), with finer geographical designations known as sub-AVAs. Such designations allow wineries to identify the geographical origin of the grapes used in producing their wines, and – equally important – seek to prevent producers outside an AVA from making false claims about the nature and origin of their wines.

Some Empirical Questions

“What is the value of terroir in the American context?” Does the “reality of terroir” – the location-specific geology and geography – predominate in determining the quality of wine? Does the “concept of terroir” – the location within an officially named appellation – impart additional value to grapes and wine? Does location within such an appellation impart additional value to vineyards?

The central question we sought to address in this work was whether measurable site attributes – such as slope, aspect, elevation, and soil type – or appellation designations are more important determinants of vineyard prices. We did this by conducting a hedonic price analysis to investigate sales of vineyards in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, one of the most important wine-producing regions in the United States.

Thinking About These Questions

How should site attributes and sub-AVA designations influence vineyard prices? If site attributes significantly affect wine quality and if consumers are able to discriminate such quality, then vineyard prices would depend on site attributes, and AVA designations might be redundant.

Alternatively, consumers might not be able to discriminate among wines perfectly and might use AVA designations as signals of average quality of wines from respective areas, and/or might derive utility directly from drinking wines which they know to be of particular pedigree. In this case, site attributes and AVA designations would influence vineyard prices, with parameters for site attributes indicating how producers value intra-AVA differences in vineyard characteristics. Presumably, producers attach premiums to site attributes that enhance wine quality, provided that consumers can perceive and are willing to pay for such quality differences.

What if, at the extreme, variation in vineyard prices were explained completely by AVA designations (that is, site attributes are irrelevant)? This would indicate that terroir matters economically – as a concept, though not as a fundamental reality. In other words, producers recognize the value of the AVA designation because they know that consumers will pay more for the experience of drinking wine from designated areas. (Likewise, producers might bid up the value of vineyards located in designated appellations because there is prestige associated with owning vineyards in these areas.) But if site attributes known to affect wine quality have no impact on vineyard prices, this would suggest that consumers cannot discern quality differences. Any appreciation they might express for an area’s terroir would essentially be founded on reputation, not reality.

Our Analysis

We estimated a hedonic model of vineyard prices in Oregon to examine whether such prices vary systematically with designated appellation, after controlling for site attributes. In other words, we carried out an econometric (statistical) analysis to examine the factors that appear to affect vineyard prices.

We employed a new data set we developed on vineyard sales with extensive information about respective properties, combined with GIS-based information on specific parcels. In our sample (actually, the universe of sales of vineyard – and potential vineyard – properties in the Willamette Valley between 1995 and 2007), the average price of vineyards was about $10,000 per acre, with prices ranging from $2,500 to $42,000 per acre.

We also carried out a check on our vineyard pricing analysis by examining price premiums paid by consumers for wines from related origins. If you’d like to read about either methodology, or see our quantitative results, please take a look at the article. But, for now, I will just summarize our results.

Some Answers

We found that vineyard prices are strongly determined by location within specific sub-AVAs, but not by site attributes. These appellations are supposed to reflect the area’s terroir, but our finding that the physical characteristics of vineyards are not priced implicitly in land markets raises questions about whether sub-AVA designations have a fundamental connection with terroir.

On the other hand, our results make clear that the concept of terroir matters economically, both to consumers and to wine producers. Buyers and sellers of vineyard parcels in the Willamette Valley of Oregon attach a significant premium to sub-AVA designations. One possibility is that buyers are less informed than sellers about how the attributes of a vineyard will affect wine quality and, therefore, rely on sub-AVA designations as quality signals.

In any event, consumers are evidently willing to pay more for the experience of drinking wines from these areas. While they may not discriminate among wines in terms of their intrinsic qualities, consumers are apparently responding to extrinsic qualities of wines, such as price and area of origin. So, terroir survives – as a concept, but somewhat less as a fundamental reality.

Unintended Consequences of Government Policies: The Depletion of America’s Wetlands

Private land-use decisions can be affected dramatically by public investments in highways, waterways, flood control, or other infrastructure. The large movement of jobs from central cities to suburbs in the postwar United States and the ongoing destruction of Amazon rain forests have occurred with major public investment in supporting infrastructure. As these examples suggest, private land-use decisions can generate major environmental and social externalities – or, in common language, unintended consequences.

In an analysis that appeared in 1990 in the American Economic Review, Adam Jaffe of Brandeis University and I demonstrated that the depletion of forested wetlands in the Mississippi Valley – an important environmental problem and a North American precursor to the loss of South American rain forests – was exacerbated by Federal water-project investments, despite explicit Federal policy to protect wetlands.

Wetland Losses

Forested wetlands are among the world’s most productive ecosystems, providing improved water quality, erosion control, floodwater storage, timber, wildlife habitat, and recreational opportunities. Their depletion globally is a serious problem; and preservation and protection of wetlands have been major Federal environmental policy goals for forty years.

From the 1950s through the mid-1970s, over one-half million acres of U.S. wetlands were lost each year. This rate slowed greatly in subsequent years, averaging approximately 60 thousand acres lost per year in the lower 48 states from 1986 through 1997. And by 2006, the Bush administration’s Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, was able to announce a net gain in wetland acreage in the United Sates, due to restoration and creation activities surpassing wetland losses.

What Caused the Observed Losses?

What were the causes of the huge annual losses of wetlands in the earlier years? That question and our analysis are as germane today as in 1990, because of lessons that have emerged about the unintended consequences of public investments.

The largest remaining wetland habitat in the continental United States is the bottomland hardwood forest of the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Plain. Originally covering 26 million acres in seven states, this resource was reduced to about 12 million acres by 1937. By 1990, another 7 million acres had been cleared, primarily for conversion to cropland.

The owner of a wetland parcel faces an economic decision involving revenues from the parcel in its natural state (primarily from timber), costs of conversion (the cost of clearing the land minus the resulting forestry windfall), and expected revenues from agriculture. Agricultural revenues depend on prices, yields, and, significantly, the drainage and flooding frequency of the land. Needless to say, landowners typically do not consider the positive environmental externalities generated by wetlands; thus conversion may occur more often than is socially optimal.

Such externalities are the motivation for Federal policy aimed at protecting wetlands, as embodied in the Clean Water Act. Nevertheless, the Federal government engaged in major public investment activities, in the form of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Soil Conservation Service flood-control and drainage projects, which appeared to make agriculture more attractive and thereby encourage wetland depletion. The significance of this effect had long been disputed by the agencies which construct and maintain these projects; they attributed the extensive conversion exclusively to rising agricultural prices.

In an econometric (statistical) analysis of data from Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, from 1935 to 1984, Jaffe and I sought to sort out the effects of Federal projects and other economic forces. We discovered that these public investments were a very substantial factor causing conversion of wetlands to agriculture, with between 30 and 50 percent of the total wetland depletion over those five decades due to the Federal projects.

More broadly, four conclusions emerged from our analysis. First, landowners had responded to economic incentives in their land-use decisions. Second, construction of Federal flood-control and drainage projects caused a higher rate of conversion of forested wetlands to croplands than would have occurred in the absence of projects, leading to the depletion of an additional 1.25 million acres of wetlands. Third, Federal projects had this impact because they made agriculture feasible on land where it had previously been infeasible, and because, on average, they improved the quality of feasible land. Fourth, adjustment of land use to economic conditions was gradual.

Government Working at Cross-Purposes

The analysis highlighted a striking inconsistency in the Federal government’s approach to wetlands. In articulated policies, laws, and regulations, the government recognized the positive externalities associated with some wetlands, with the George H.W. Bush administration first enunciating a “no net loss of wetlands” policy. But public investments in wetlands – in the form of flood-control and drainage projects – had created major incentives to convert these areas to alternative uses. The government had been working at cross-purposes.

The conclusion that major public infrastructure investments affect private land-use decisions (thereby often generating negative externalities) may not be a surprise to some readers, but it was the 1990 analysis described here that first provided rigorous evidence which contrasted sharply with the accepted wisdom among policy makers.

The Ongoing Importance of Induced Land-Use Changes

As wetlands, tropical rain forests, barrier islands, and other sensitive environmental areas become more scarce, their marginal social value rises. In general, if induced land-use changes are not considered, the country will engage in more public investment programs whose net social benefits are negative.

Policies Can Work in Strange Ways

Whether the policy domain is global climate change or local hazardous waste, it’s exceptionally important to understand the interaction between public policies and technological change in order to assess the effects of laws and regulations on environmental performance. Several years ago, my colleagues - Professor Lori Bennear of Duke University and Professor Nolan Miller of the University of Illinois – examined with me the effects of regulation on technological change in chlorine manufacturing by focusing on the diffusion of membrane-cell technology, widely viewed as environmentally superior to both mercury-cell and diaphragm-cell technologies. Our results were both interesting and surprising, and merit thinking about in the context of current policy discussions and debates in Washington.

The chlorine manufacturing industry had experienced a substantial shift over time toward the membrane technology. Two different processes drove this shift: adoption of cleaner technologies at existing plants (that is, adoption), and the closing of facilities using diaphragm and mercury cells (in other words, exit). In our study, we considered the effects of both direct regulation of chlorine manufacturing and regulation of downstream uses of chlorine. (By the way, you can read a more detailed version of this story in our article in the American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, volume 93, 2003, pp. 431-435.)

In 1972, a widely publicized incident of mercury poisoning in Minamata Bay, Japan, led the Japanese government to prohibit the use of mercury cells for chlorine production. The United States did not follow suit, but it did impose more stringent constraints on mercury-cell units during the early 1970’s. Subsequently, chlorine manufacturing became subject to increased regulation under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. In addition, chlorine manufacturing became subject to public-disclosure requirements under the Toxics Release Inventory.

In addition to regulation of the chlorine manufacturing process, there was also increased environmental pressure on industries that used chlorine as an input. This indirect regulation was potentially important for choices of chlorine manufacturing technology because a large share of chlorine was and is manufactured for onsite use in the production of other products. Changes in regulations in downstream industries can have substantial impacts on the demand for chlorine and thereby affect the rate of entry and exit of chlorine production plants.

Two major indirect regulations altered the demand for chlorine. One was the Montreal Protocol, which regulated the production of ozone-depleting chemicals, such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), for which chlorine is a key ingredient. The other important indirect regulation was the “Cluster Rule,” which tightened restrictions on the release of chlorinated compounds from pulp and paper mills to both water and air. This led to increased interest by the industry in non-chlorine bleaching agents, which in turn affected the economic viability of some chlorine plants.

In our econometric (statistical) analysis, we analyzed the effects of economic and regulatory factors on adoption and exit decisions by chlorine manufacturing plants from 1976 to 2001. For our analysis of adoption, we employed data on 51 facilities, eight of which had adopted the membrane technology during the period we investigated.

We found that the effects of the regulations on the likelihood of adopting membrane technology were not statistically significant. Mercury plants, which were subject to stringent regulation for water, air, and hazardous-waste removal, were no more likely to switch to the membrane technology than diaphragm plants. Similarly, TRI reporting appeared to have had no significant effect on adoption decisions.

We also examined what caused plants to exit the industry, with data on 55 facilities, 21 of which ceased operations between 1976 and 2001. Some interesting and quite striking patterns emerged. Regulations clearly explained some of the exit behavior. In particular, indirect regulations of the end-uses of chlorine accelerated shutdowns in some industries. Facilities affected by the pulp and paper cluster rule and the Montreal Protocol were substantially more likely to shut down than were other facilities.

It is good to remember that the diffusion of new technology is the result of a combination of adoption at existing facilities and entry and exit of facilities with various technologies in place. In the case of chlorine manufacturing, our results indicated that regulatory factors did not have a significant effect on the decision to adopt the greener technology at existing plants. On the other hand, indirect regulation of the end-uses of chlorine accelerated facility closures significantly, and thereby increased the share of plants using the cleaner, membrane technology for chlorine production.

Environmental regulation did affect technological change, but not in the way many people assume it does. It did so not by encouraging the adoption of some technology by existing facilities, but by reducing the demand for a product and hence encouraging the shutdown of facilities using environmentally inferior options. This is a legitimate way for policies to operate, although it’s one most politicians would probably prefer not to recognize.