UC Davis ARE professor Eric Edwards presented his work, joint with Sara Sutherland, examining the political and economic determinants of the supply of national park land. Political science and economics offer a variety of models on how a government provides public goods under competing economic incentives across institutions, but empirical evidence remains limited. In this paper, Eric and Sara examine park additions and budget allocation decisions by the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) from 1918 to 2004 to better understand how governments provide a public good, the preservation of areas of natural or historical significance. The NPS has become the model for parks that now exist in over 100 countries and is uniquely popular, with the highest public favorability rating of any U.S. government agency.  While most NPS sites charge visitors a toll to visit, for the entire study period these revenues were returned to the general Treasury and NPS was entirely reliant on Congressional allocations. In addition, Congress is responsible for adding new National Parks and can add other perseveration properties (e.g. Monuments, Historical Sites). 

Eric and Sara test the responsiveness of appropriations and additions to visitation and political pressure, finding that park budgets increase with visitation, but the responsiveness is small overall and primarily concentrated on National Parks. Whilethey find only limited evidence of political incentives to increase the budgets of sites in the home states of key Congressional committee members, they find more evidence of ``park barrel" channel, by which politicians on the relevant committees designate NPS sites in their home districts.