ABSTRACT
As wildlife management agencies have been struggling financially, there continues to be a greater need for revenue to sustain wildlife and cover their costs. With the sales of hunting licenses playing an important role in a state wildlife agency’s revenue, there has been a debate regarding whether to raise the license fee since a loss of revenue will result if the price elasticity of the hunting license is elastic. This study first used a panel dataset containing national surveys from 1996 to 2011 across the United States to explore this issue. A General Two-Stage Least Squares (G2SLS) model was employed to estimate the demand for residents’ hunting licenses, while an Ordinary Least Squares ;(OLS) model was applied to determine the demand for nonresidents’ hunting licenses. Price elasticities of −0.176 and −0.066 for resident and nonresident hunting licenses were obtained, respectively. The results supported the view that raising the hunting license fee would bring in more license sales revenue.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. = 0.37.
2. The number of households sampled in the National survey.
The first phase
The second phase
1996
80,000
22,578
2001
80,000
25,070
2006
85,000
21,938
2011
48,600
11,330