Very little study has been made of the welfare cost of toxic contamination in freshwater fish, primarily because appropriate data sets have not been available. This paper estimates the benefits of removing toxic contamination from New York State water bodies by linking the Environmental Protection Agency's Aquatic Based Recreation Survey with water-quality data from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. Using a repeated discrete choice model of fishing behavior, we find that the elimination of toxic contamination from New York lakes and ponds would generate an annual benefit of about $63 per capita, per season.
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Montgomery et al. (1997) studied this question.