2017 Grantee: Mississippi State University ECONOMICS

Learn more about Mississippi State University’s Agricultural Economics Department at their website.

Grant Project: “Valuing Sites of Cultural Significance”

MSU was awarded a $24,500 grant to support graduate research generating knowledge about and providing estimation of the economic value of preserving sites of cultural significance. 3 sites were used as basis of the research.

Grant Experience

Associate professor Dr. Matthew Interis poses with graduate student Kaylee Wells and MDNHA grants consultant Mike Ward in front of the house where prominent actor James Earl Jones was born. This site, the Teoc community, and the Alcazar Hotel site in Clarksdale were selected for study.

STUDY METHODOLOGY

Mississippi residents were surveyed to discover what financial amount they would be willing to pay to achieve a restoration scenario of one of the three cultural sites.

These values were estimated using common non-market valuation methods in economics. “The researchers collect data in which respondents make some kind of tradeoff between money and the thing being valued and then fit the data to an economic behavioral model which controls for other factors such as respondent demographics and other behavioral and attitudinal data.”

ABOUT THE GRANTEE

The Department of Agricultural Economics is committed to improving the economic well-being of the citizens of the state, nation and world by providing educational opportunities and scholarship-based knowledge to encourage life-long learning and economic decision skills related to agriculture, natural resources, and community development.

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