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Valuing historic battlefields: an application of the travel cost method to three American Civil War battlefields

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Abstract

This paper presents individual demand models for three historic battlefield sites maintained by the US National Park Service. Preserved battlefields are valuable cultural resources that make up a significant portion of the US National Park system, but have received scant attention from economists. The demand for trips is modeled as a count data process. Visitor data for these battlefields were collected on-site, so the models account for truncation in the observed number of trips and endogenous stratification. The travel cost method, which is seeing increasing application in cultural heritage research, is used to estimate the use value of each battlefield. The results indicate an average individual willingness to pay for a battlefield trip ranging from about $8–$25, depending on the site.

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Notes

  1. In the US National Park system, visits to designated national battlefields constitute 20 % of the visits to designated national historic parks, including National Battlefields, Military Parks, Historic Sites and Historical Parks, and 3 % of all visits to units in the National Park system.

  2. The US Park Service uses several designations for national battlefields, including National Military Park, National Battlefield and National Battlefield Park, for a total of 25 preserved sites. A few other designations, particular the National Monument, are used to preserve several other battlefields. Of course, there are also innumerable military heritage sites preserved by the states and private organizations.

  3. Several other count data model specifications were tested to accommodate overdispersion, including the Negative Binomial and Generalized Negative Binomial, both accounting for truncation and endogenous stratification (see Martinez-Espineira and Amoako-Tuffour 2008). These models occasionally had difficulty converging during the maximization routine and the estimated values for the overdispersion parameter were suggestive of, as Hilbe (2011) argues, a poor model fit. In contrast, the method presented here should be more robust to misspecification.

  4. It is possible to investigate the robustness of this proxy and any bias by comparing the Stones River demand model results reported below, which use respondent income in calculating travel costs, with a Stones River demand model that uses respondent ZIP code median income in calculating travel costs. The results of this latter regression are not reported for brevity, but they do reveal the presence of bias from measurement error: using zip code median income, the travel cost parameter estimate is skewed toward zero and approximately 13.5 % smaller than the unbiased estimate. If Stones River visitors are representative of the other battlefield visitors, then this result implies that the ZIP code median income proxies do indeed cause bias, although the degree of bias is not too severe.

  5. Other substitute sites fit the criteria, specifically Shiloh National Battlefield and Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, located in Tennessee, and Antietam National Battlefield, located in Maryland. However, these substitutes site were not found to play a significant role in the fitted models.

  6. To deal with multi-destination and incidental visitors, Loomis et al. (2000) suggest including dummy variables for unplanned trips and multi-destination trips. This method was tested in the Stones River and Fort Donelson demand models and, like the results of Loomis et al., did not produce significantly different travel cost parameter estimates.

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Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Margaret Littlejohn and David Vollmer of the Visitor Services Project for making the data sets available and to two anonymous referees for providing valuable comments on an earlier version of the paper.

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  1. Department of Economics and Finance, Salisbury University, 217 Perdue Hall, Salisbury, MD, 21801, USA

    Richard T. Melstrom

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Correspondence to Richard T. Melstrom.

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Melstrom, R.T. Valuing historic battlefields: an application of the travel cost method to three American Civil War battlefields. J Cult Econ 38, 223–236 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-013-9209-7

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