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Does animal charisma influence conservation funding for vertebrate species under the US Endangered Species Act?

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Abstract

The US federal government spent 6 billion dollars to protect endangered species in 2013. The previous studies have shown that federal funding allocated under the Endangered Species Act is not necessarily based on the priority a species has been assigned by the Fish and Wildlife Service. This paper asks whether this continues to be the case using more recent data from 2013. It analyzes what factors affect total species funding by various federal agencies under the Endangered Species Act, and particularly examines the role of animal charisma using the number of Google results per species as a proxy. Results show that, while federal priority ranking had no effect on funding, charisma had a significant effect, suggesting biased funding for some species of animals.

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Notes

  1. We checked that neither was a highly influential point on the regression by checking if they had a Cook’s distance, which measures the effect of deleting a given data point, greater than 4 divided by the sample size (4/265) (Bollen and Jackman 1990), which they did not.

  2. The RESET test did not reject the null that the model is correctly specified (F(3,249) = 0.55, p = 0.6499).

  3. We rejected a null of homoskedasticity using a degree-of-freedom conserving form of the White test, indicating that heteroskedasticity is a threat to efficiency (F(2,262) = 5.25, p = 0.0058).

  4. We get this from (100(exp(2.332) − 1), since the variable is a dummy and the model has a logged-dependent variable.

Abbreviations

ESA:

Endangered Species Act

FWS:

Fish and Wildlife Service

NOAA:

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

OLS:

Ordinary Least Squares

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank P. Jefferson for the initial impulse which led to this paper as well as his feedback. I am also grateful to F. Carocciolo for providing econometric advice. Finally I would like to thank J. Lauderdale for comments and editing.

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  1. Alejandro M. Bellon

    Present address: Arizona State University, Life Sciences A Wing #123, Tempe, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, Tempe, USA

    Alejandro M. Bellon

  2. Swarthmore College, 500 College Ave, Swarthmore, PA, 19081, USA

    Alejandro M. Bellon

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Bellon, A.M. Does animal charisma influence conservation funding for vertebrate species under the US Endangered Species Act?. Environ Econ Policy Stud 21, 399–411 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10018-018-00235-1

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