About

Michael Hanemann is a professor of economics with the W. P. Carey School of Business and a Julie A. Wrigley Chair in Sustainability in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. He is an environmental economist who works in the areas of water economics and policy, climate change, and non-market valuation. He is also the director of the Center for Environmental Economics and Sustainability Policy at ASU. Prior to his tenure at ASU, he served as a Chancellor's professor and professor of environmental and resource economics in the Department of Agricultural and Resources Economics at the University of California-Berkeley from 1968 to 2011. Professor Hanemann is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has received numerous awards and honors, including honorary Ph.D. degrees from the University of Vigo in Spain and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, as well as fellowships and awards from various professional associations. His educational background includes a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, an M.A. in Public Finance and Decision Theory from Harvard University, an M.Sc. in Development Economics from the London School of Economics, and a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University. His research focuses on environmental economics, water economics and policy, climate change, and valuation of non-market resources, contributing significantly to these fields through his academic and policy work.

Selected publications

• The Existence Value of a Distinctive Native American Culture: Survival of the Hopi Reservation

  UNC Libraries · 2025-07-16

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Ben Franklin’s Whistle, Cost Expectations, and the Choice of Valuation Format

  Environmental and Resource Economics · 2025-03-31 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• THE ATTITUDE–BEHAVIOR DICHOTOMY IN THE TIME OF COVID-19: AN EXPLORATION USING GENERALIZED STRUCTURAL EQUATION MODELING

  The Singapore Economic Review · 2024-04-26

  articleOpen access

  The COVID-19 pandemic brought the need to quickly deploy non-pharmaceutical measures like facemasks to reduce transmission rates into sharp focus. Factors influencing this behavior are examined through the classic attitude–behavior lens of Fishbein and Ajzen [Belief, Attitude, Intention, and Behavior: An Introduction to Theory and Research. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley] cast in the language of property rights and social norms. Behavior is operationalized as wearing a facemask (or not) and attitude in terms of supporting a mandatory mask mandate. This yields targetable segments of the population as they are referred to in a marketing context: wearing/supporting, wearing/not supporting, not wearing/supporting, not wearing/not supporting [Kim, D, RT Carson, D Whittington and WM Hanemann (2022). Support for regulation versus compliance: Face masks during COVID-19. Public Health in Practice, 5, 100324]. Membership in each segment is predicted using a generalized structural equation modelling (GSEM) approach focused on three broad factors. The first includes political and demographic variables, which represent exogenous taste parameters. The second is a set of knowledge variables characterizing the COVID-19 information a person possesses. These are potentially influenceable by health officials. The third relates to risk cast in the form of knowing someone who had tested positive for COVID-19, been hospitalized or died from it. The GSEM results paint a rich picture of how our factor sets interact with the four targetable segments of the population in a critical situation where high but not perfect compliance is needed.

  PublisherDOI

• THE ATTITUDE–BEHAVIOR DICHOTOMY IN THE TIME OF COVID-19: AN EXPLORATION USING GENERALIZED STRUCTURAL EQUATION MODELING

  UNC Libraries · 2024-09-07

  articleOpen access

  The COVID-19 pandemic brought the need to quickly deploy non-pharmaceutical measures like facemasks to reduce transmission rates into sharp focus. Factors influencing this behavior are examined through the classic attitude–behavior lens of Fishbein and Ajzen [Belief, Attitude, Intention, and Behavior: An Introduction to Theory and Research. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley] cast in the language of property rights and social norms. Behavior is operationalized as wearing a facemask (or not) and attitude in terms of supporting a mandatory mask mandate. This yields targetable segments of the population as they are referred to in a marketing context: wearing/supporting, wearing/not supporting, not wearing/supporting, not wearing/not supporting [Kim, D, RT Carson, D Whittington and WM Hanemann (2022). Support for regulation versus compliance: Face masks during COVID-19. Public Health in Practice, 5, 100324]. Membership in each segment is predicted using a generalized structural equation modelling (GSEM) approach focused on three broad factors. The first includes political and demographic variables, which represent exogenous taste parameters. The second is a set of knowledge variables characterizing the COVID-19 information a person possesses. These are potentially influenceable by health officials. The third relates to risk cast in the form of knowing someone who had tested positive for COVID-19, been hospitalized or died from it. The GSEM results paint a rich picture of how our factor sets interact with the four targetable segments of the population in a critical situation where high but not perfect compliance is needed.

  PublisherDOI

• Ceremonial and Subsistence Water Use

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science · 2024-02-26

  reference-entrySenior author

  Water for cultural and religious purposes, referred to as ceremonial and subsistence (C&S) use, is a distinctive feature of many Indigenous and other communities. Whether this constitutes a legitimate claim for water for an American Indian Tribe in the United States was litigated in the context of a trial to determine the federal government’s obligation to reserve water for Indian Tribes whom it had settled on reservations during the 19th century. Following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1963, the amount of water the federal government was obligated to provide was defined as the quantity of water that could be used to grow crops profitably on the reservation. In 2001, the Arizona Supreme Court adopted a new definition, for Arizona, namely the amount of water that ensured the reservation would be a permanent homeland. However, parts of this 2001 ruling were contradictory and seemed to support the profitable irrigation standard. What the Arizona Supreme Court actually meant was not put to the test until the Hopi water rights trial in 2020. The Hopi Tribe’s water rights claims included a claim for new water to replace diminishing local water supplies in order for the Tribe to continue cultivating traditional varietals of corn and other crops. Hopi agricultural practices date back at least a millennium and are a central part of Hopi culture and religion. The crops are used in cultural and religious ceremonies and are not sold commercially. The Hopi claim for water for irrigation to support C&S cultivation was opposed by the other parties to the case and was rejected by the court.

  PublisherDOI

• The Economic Value of Water

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science · 2024-04-16

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  In economics, the value of an item—including water—to a person is defined as the most of something else of value (typically money, but sometimes time) the person is willing to give up to obtain that item (willingness to pay) or the minimum compensation the person would want to receive in exchange for forgoing the item (willingness to accept). These are measures of gross value; they are in principle quantitative; and they are subjective and idiosyncratic to the individual and the circumstances. The economic value of an item is not measured by its price. It is likely to vary with the amount of the item and should not be taken as a constant. A core conceptual distinction is between use value and nonuse value. A person’s use value for an item is the value that she places on the item from motives connected with the use of the item by someone, whether her own use or that of someone else. Nonuse value is the value she places on an item from motives not directly connected with the use of that item by anybody in any tangible way. For example, a person may value water to drink (a use value), but he may also value having water remain in its natural state (a nonuse value). Consumptive uses are use values, but nonconsumptive uses can also be use values (e.g., swimming in a lake). Other conceptual distinctions include that between wet water and paper water (water that exists on paper but is not actually accessible or usable), and that between raw water alone versus water accompanied by the infrastructure necessary to store it and convey it so as to make it available for use.

  PublisherDOI

• Water as a Merit Good

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science · 2024-03-19 · 2 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  In economics, a merit good is a good which it is judged that an individual or group of individuals should have (at least up to a certain quantity) on the basis of some concept of need, rather than on the basis of ability or willingness to pay. Examples include public elementary education and free hospitals for the poor alongside access to safe, affordable, and reliable water and sanitation. Exactly how a merit good is provided can be subjected to an economic test, but not <italic>whether</italic> the merit good should be provided. While there are some overlaps in application, the concept of a merit good is distinct from other economic concepts: A merit good may or may not be a public good, and it may or may not involve an externality. However, water and sanitation infrastructure may indeed be viewed as a form of social overhead capital. A merit good is an economic concept; the human right is an ethical concept—and, sometimes, a legal concept. That said, the concept of a merit good and the judgment that a particular item is a merit good clearly have an ethical component. If one accepts the existence of a human right to water and sanitation, that could certainly motivate a government decision to make the provision of water and sanitation a merit good. Even if a commodity is deemed to be a merit good, that still leaves open questions: To which group of people should it be provided as a merit good? In what quantity should it be provided? At what price, if any? By whom should it be provided? And how should the cost be funded?

  PublisherDOI

• Discrete-continuous models of residential energy demand: A comprehensive review

  Resource and Energy Economics · 2024-01-11 · 4 citations

  reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper reviews forty years of research applying econometric models of discrete-continuous choice to analyze residential demand for energy. The review is primarily from the perspective of economic theory. We examine how well the utility-theoretic models developed in the literature match data that is commonly available on residential energy use, and we highlight the modeling challenges that have arisen through efforts to match theory with data. The literature contains two different formalizations of a corner solution. The first, by Dubin and McFadden (1984) and Hanemann (1984), models an extreme corner solution, in which only one of the discrete choice alternatives is chosen. While those papers share similarities, they also have some differences which have not been noticed or exposited in the literature. Subsequently, a formulation first implemented by Wales and Woodland (1983) and extended by Kim et al. (2002) and Bhat (2008) models a general corner solution, where several but not all of the discrete choice alternatives are chosen. Seventeen papers have employed one or another of these models to analyze residential demand for fuels and/or energy end uses in a variety of countries. We review issues that arose in these applications and identify some alternative model formulations that can be used in future work on residential energy demand.

  PublisherDOI

• Participatory Convergence: Integrating Convergence and Participatory Action Research

  Minerva · 2024-11-17 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This paper introduces the concept of “Participatory Convergence” as a framework to meet grand social-ecological challenges. Participatory Convergence combines the principles of Convergence Research with Participatory Action Research (PAR), offering a novel approach to tackling complex societal problems. Convergence Research seeks to foster high-level integration between diverse disciplines to address multifaceted issues, emphasizing systems thinking and solutions orientation; however, existing literature falls short in providing practical models for the deep integration of diverse disciplines, community partners, and community members. This paper aims to bridge these gaps by integrating Convergence Research with PAR. We illustrate the application of Participatory Convergence with a case study: the “Action for Water Equity” project, focusing on water challenges faced by communities in U.S. colonias along the U.S.–Mexico border. The Action for Water Equity project is a practical example of how Participatory Convergence can be applied to tackle pressing challenges while embracing diversity, inclusivity, and adaptability. This approach holds the potential to facilitate comprehensive solutions for global challenges and foster meaningful change through interdisciplinary collaboration, community engagement, and a commitment to sustainability and equity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Climate change adaptation in China: Differences in electricity consumption between rural and urban residents

  Energy Economics · 2024-10-12 · 7 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Awards & honors

• Elected to US National Academy of Sciences, 2011
• Honorary Ph.D University of Vigo, Spain, January 2015
• Fellow, American Association of Agricultural Economics, 2010
• Winner, American Agricultural Economics Association Award fo…
• Lifetime Award for Outstanding Achievement, European Associa…