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The focus of this special section is the conceptual and empirical issues regarding benefit transfer applications. A benefit transfer is the application of monetary values obtained from a particular nonmarket goods analysis to an alternative or secondary policy decision setting. The papers address the ongoing development of the procedures for benefit transfers through a case study approach. This paper attempts to focus the discussion of benefit transfers and highlight the issues discussed in each of the papers. INTRODUCTIONThe papers in this special section examine the conceptual and empirical issues associated with benefit transfer applications, that is, the application of monetary values obtained for a specific nonmarket goods analysis to an alternative or secondary policy decision setting. An earlier special section of this journal entitled "On Valuing Water-Based Recreation" considered nonmarket valuation issues for waterbased recreation (see Brookshire and Smith [1987] for an overview). The following set of papers builds upon the previous special section. While the earlier special section emphasized the evolutionary state of nonmarket benefit estimation, the authors of these papers move to the conceptual and empirical issues regarding the use of nonmarket benefit estimates.Our interest in considering what constitutes a benefit transfer is to gain insight into the nature of the process, and the potential limits of benefit transfer applications. We begin by considering different views as to what is a benefit transfer application: Desvousges et al. [this issue] characterize a benefit transfer as follows:We call the use of existing studies "benefit transfer." The river where an existing study was conducted is termed the "study site •' and the river under consideration for water quality improvements the "policy site." The estimated benefits are "transferred" from the study site to the policy site. Boyle and Bergstrom [this issue] similarly describe a benefit transfer as the transfer of existing estimates of nonmarket values to a newstudy which is different from the study for which the values were originally estimated .... [T]his is simply the application of secondary data to a new policy issue. Smith [this issue] suggests the process of a benefit transferinvolves focusling] on measuring (in dollars) how much the people affected by some policy will gain from it. They are not forecasts, and they usually do not attempt to predict other exogenous influences on people's behavior. Instead, a predefined set of' conditions is assumed to characterize the nonpolicy variables. Then benefit estimates are derived by focusing on the effects of the conditions assumed to be changed by the policy.

Spray-drying represents a viable alternative to freeze-drying for preparing dry powder dispersions for delivering macromolecules to the lung. The dispersibility of spray-dried powders is limited however, and needs to be enhanced to improve lung deposition and subsequent biological activity. In this study, we investigate the utility of leucine as a dry powder dispersibility enhancer when added prior to spray-drying a model non-viral gene therapy formulation (lipid:polycation:pDNA, LPD). Freeze-dried lactose-LPD, spray-dried lactose-LPD and spray-dried leucine-lactose-LPD powders were prepared. Scanning electron microscopy showed that leucine increased the surface roughness of spray-dried lactose particles. Particle size analysis revealed that leucine-containing spray-dried powders were unimodally dispersed with a mean particle diameter of 3.12 microm. Both gel electrophoresis and in vitro cell (A549) transfection showed that leucine may compromise the integrity and biological functionality of the gene therapy vector. The deposition of the leucine containing powder was however significantly enhanced as evidenced by an increase in gene expression mediated by dry powder collected at lower stages of a multistage liquid impinger (MSLI). Further studies are required to determine the potential of leucine as a ubiquitous dispersibility enhancer for a variety of pulmonary formulations.

In this comment we examine the conclusion by Forgey, Rutherford and VanBuskirk (1994) ''that the foreclosed properties sold at a 23% discount,'' using a sample of nearly 2,000 residential property sales from the Las Vagas, Nevada area. We found that when not controlling for location with a set of dummy variables for zip codes, HUD foreclosed properties sold for between 12.18% and 13.96% below a random sample of properties not within one block of foreclosed properties. When controlling for location, using a set of thirty-one dummy variables for zip codes, the foreclosure discount fell to between 8.45% and 9.72%. When controlling for the common characteristics between foreclosed properties and their neighbors, we found foreclosure discounts are very small (between .17% and 2.58%) and no longer statistically significant. We conclude that foreclosure does not provide an opportunity for arbitrage profits, and this study does reinforce the findings of other studies that conclude real estate markets operate efficiently.

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