Italian historical buildings require urgent and costly maintenance and restoration works, but neither the local, nor the national public administrators can afford these expenditures. Nevertheless the built cultural heritage represent a unique resource of the territory, as it embodies the local social, historical, and cultural values, generates positive externalities (Musgrave, 1959), and stimulates economic activities mainly related to tourism. Is it possible to quantify how much we care about historical buildings and to measure this value in monetary terms? The aim of this paper is to answer to this question via the hedonimetric approach. Specifically, we try to verify if the proximity to historical villas, districts, palaces, squares, fortresses, religious buildings and archeological site systematically influence the house market equilibrium price in the Veneto region (Italy). The paper is organized as follows: in section two a brief review of the literature is reported, in section three the database used for the hedonimetric estimates is described, in section four the econometric models and the results we had obtained are illustrated, and in section five some final comments are drawn.

Speed limits were introduced in the Lagoon of Venice in 2002 to reduce wave motion, which damages environmentally sensitive areas in the broader Lagoon as well as buildings in the city of Venice. In this paper, we estimate the welfare losses experienced by recreational boaters as a result of the speed limits. We fit a single-site travel cost model to a sample of boaters intercepted as they depart from or arrive to marinas and launching ramps on the Lagoon. Our Poisson model is corrected for truncation and endogenous stratification. We construct three measures of the price per trip, which allow us to check the sensitivity of models and welfare estimates to possible measurement errors in the opportunity cost of time. Our results are robust to the measure of price used and conservatively peg the welfare losses of boaters to EUR 7.7-9.6 million per year. Even under conservative assumptions, the welfare losses of boaters are sufficiently large that, given current monitoring and enforcement of the speed limits, we believe there is a strong incentive for boaters to disregard the limits.

This paper reports the results of a Travel Cost Method (TCM) study about the recreational use of the Lagoon of Venice for sports fishing. In April-July 2002, we conducted a mail survey of anglers with valid licenses fishing on the Lagoon of Venice to gather data on their fishing trips, behaviors and expenditures over the previous year. We also asked questions about trips that would be undertaken under hypothetical changes in the price of a trip and/or in the catch rate. Actual and hypothetical trips are combined to estimate single-site TCM demand function for trips. We propose several models to test whether it is acceptable to pool hypothetical and actual trip data, focusing on the respondent heterogeneity in the contingent behavior questions. Our models suggest actual and contingent behavior are driven by the same demand function, and can be pooled for estimation purposes. We use this estimated demand function, and its shift when the catch rate is improved, to compute angler surplus at the current catch rate and the change in surplus accruing from a 50% improvement in the catch rate. For the average angler in our sample, the former is about Euro 1,700 a year, while the latter is about Euro 2,800.