Download or read book Essays of Empirical Studies in Agricultural and Resource Economics written by Zhihua Shen and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Agricultural and Resource Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation provides theoretical and empirical contributions to investigate the roles and sources of the technological innovation and the productivity growth via three essays. Employing the patent count and citation data over 1977-2011, the first chapter explores the determining factors of innovations of the U.S. biofuel. I confirm that the knowledge stocks existing in the industry and the crude oil price significantly affect the technological innovations of biofuel in U.S. The second chapter investigates the productivity growth in major dairy production regions in U.S. I show that the emerging dairy regions have relatively higher productivity than the traditional regions. Dynamic decomposition results indicate that surviving farms contribute more than entering and exiting farms. Farm and regional driving forces of farm productivity are also examined. The third chapter investigates landowners' decisions on the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) under a model of land uses. I develop a structural model to examine the manner in which agricultural productivity, market conditions, and CRP payment affect landowner's land use decisions. A novel identification strategy is employed to control for endogeneity of CRP payment and landowners' self-selection into the program. The parameter estimates are used to simulate the impact of increased agricultural prices and CRP payment on the program enrollment and costs.

Download or read book Institutions and Sustainability written by Volker Beckmann and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-02-07 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the first vague idea to use Konrad Hagedorn’s 60th birthday as an inspi- tion for taking stock of his vibrant academic contributions, this joint book project has been a great pleasure for us in many ways. Pursuing Hagedorn’s intellectual development, we have tried to reflect on the core questions of humanity according to Ernst Bloch “Who are we?”, “Where do we come from?” and “Where are we heading?” In this way, and without knowing it, Konrad Hagedorn initiated a c- lective action process he would have very much enjoyed ... if he had been allowed to take part in it. But it was our aim and constant motivation to surprise him with this collection of essays in his honour. Konrad Hagedorn was reared as the youngest child of a peasant family on a small farm in the remote moorland of East Frisia, Germany. During his childhood in the poverty-ridden years after the Second World War, he faced a life where humans were heavily dependent on using nature around them for their livelihoods; meanwhile, he learned about the fragility of the environment. As a boy, he - tended a one-room schoolhouse, where his great intellectual talents were first r- ognised and used for co-teaching his schoolmates. These early teaching expe- ences might have laid the foundations for his later becoming a dedicated lecturer and mentor.

Download or read book Modern Agricultural and Resource Economics and Policy written by Harry de Gorter and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-23 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume celebrates the life and career of Gordon Rausser, pioneer and leader in natural resource economics, while critically overviewing the emerging literature in the field. As the chair of the Agriculture and Resource Economics department at UC Berkeley, Rausser led the transformation of the department from a traditional agricultural economics department to a diverse resource economics department addressing issues of agriculture, food, natural resources, environmental economics, energy, and development. This book builds on this theme, showcasing not only the scope of Rausser's work but also key developments in the field. The volume is organized into two parts. The first part speaks about the lessons of Gordon Rausser's career, in particular, his role as a leader in different spheres, his capacity to integrate teaching and entrepreneurship, and his impact on the world food system. The second part will address some of the significant developments in the field he contributed to and how it relates to his work. The chapters include contributions from modern leaders in the economics field and cover diverse topics from many subfields including public policy, public finance, law, econometrics, macroeconomics, and water resources. Providing an excellent reference, as well as a celebration of a pivotal figure in the field, this volume will be useful for practitioners and scholars in agricultural and resource economics, especially the many individuals familiar with Gordon Rausser and his career.

Download or read book Three Essays in Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics written by Dallas Wayne Wood and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Poverty Inequality and Development written by Alain de Janvry and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-06-09 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays honors a remarkable man and his work. Erik Thorbecke has made significant contributions to the microeconomic and the macroeconomic analysis of poverty, inequality and development, ranging from theory to empirics and policy. The essays in this volume display the same range. As a collection they make the fundamental point that deep understanding of these phenomena requires both the micro and the macro perspectives together, utilizing the strengths of each but also the special insights that come when the two are linked together. After an overview section which contains the introductory chapter and a chapter examining the historical roots of Erik Thorbecke's motivations, the essays in this volume are grouped into four parts, each part identifying a major strand of Erik's work—Measurement of Poverty and Inequality, Micro Behavior and Market Failure, SAMs and CGEs, and Institutions and Development. The range of topics covered in the essays, written by leading authorities in their own areas, highlight the extraordinary depth and breadth of Erik Thorbecke's influence in research and policy on poverty, inequality and development. Acknowledgements These papers were presented at a conference in honor of Erik Thorbecke held at Cornell University on October 10-11, 2003. The conference was supported by the funds of the H. E. Babcock Chair in Food, Nutrition and Public Policy, and the T. H. Lee Chair in World Affairs at Cornell University.

Download or read book Essays on Agricultural and Environmental Economics written by Shuwei Zeng and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation will provide theoretical and empirical contributions to the evaluation of productivity and environmental performance and policy analysis with an application to milk production. Our case studies involve the use of U.S. as well as Irish farm-level data. I provide methods to quantify differences of productivity estimates with different measures of input and output in production function, incorporate environmental performance in productivity evaluation and investigate the impacts of major dairy policy reforms via three essays.

Download or read book Three Essays on Environmental and Agricultural Economics written by Jayash Paudel and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dissertation gathers empirical evidence from several data sources in the United States and Nepal to provide a better understanding of the linkage between agriculture and the environment. The first essay examines the impact of fertilizer use on water quality using over 2.9 million pollution readings on nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in water sites across the U.S. Findings show that a 10% increase in the use of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers leads to a 1.47% increase in the concentration of nitrogen and a 1.68% increase in the concentration of phosphorus, respectively. Results also indicate that there exists heterogeneity in nutrient pollution elasticity estimates across 18 water resource regions. The second essay presents empirical evidence that farmers adjust fertilizer application in response to variation in temperature and precipitation trends during the growing season in the corn belt of the United States. Estimates indicate that farmers increase nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer use by 0.172% and 0.238% in response to moderate heat. However, farmers decrease nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer application by 0.260% and 0.323% in response to temperature exceeding a threshold that leads to damaging effects on crop production. I further find that farmers will apply 37.41% more nitrogen fertilizers by mid-century when compared to a world without climate change, leading to deterioration of water quality. I show that the resulting nutrient runoff will increase nitrogen and phosphorus pollution by 9.72% and 12.91% under a business-as-usual scenario. The final essay studies the impact of a fertilizer subsidy program in the Hills region of Nepal that aims to enhance agricultural yields of smallholder farmers. Using data from household surveys conducted before and after the program, I apply difference-in-differences estimation to show that the subsidy, on average, leads to a 38.7% increase in fertilizer use among eligible households. However, compared to farmers with larger plot sizes, smallholder farmers experience a 12.1% decrease in the use of chemical fertilizers and a 21.2% decrease in agricultural yield after the subsidy program. I discuss how fertilizer supply shortages and varying access to the subsidy contribute to the negative impact of the subsidy program among smallholder farmers.

Download or read book Essays in Environmental Resource and Agricultural Economics written by Casey Rozowski and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Agricultural Production Behavior Renewable Natural Resources and Welfare Dynamics written by Steven Wayne Wilcox and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The proportion of the world's population that directly interacts with agriculture and natural resources for their daily bread is declining amidst structural transformation (Timmer et al. 2009). Commensurately, the expectations and hopes placed on the remaining food and fiber producers in the world seems to ever increase, not only in terms of the provision of food and fiber, but increasingly in terms of environmental management and the conservation of intersecting natural resources (Blundo et al. 2018, Messerli et al. 2019, Wunder et al. 2020, Baylis et al. 2022). It is not a stretch to declare that there is a lot riding on the welfare of the food and fiber producers of the world (e.g., food security), and on the extent to which conditions that enhance the welfare of the farmer (gatherer) also enhance general welfare in matters beyond the direct provision of food and fiber (e.g., climate change, pollution control, and biodiversity conservation). To manage this state of affairs, the economics underpinning the production behavior of food and fiber producers and associated realized outcomes, are paramount to understand theoretically and to test empirically. In what follows, three applications are studied, each with a focus on a renewable natural resource of concern and an intersecting agricultural production sector where little to no empirical work has be done. The settings and questions are each broadly important and timely: * Do food price shocks cause deforestation, and if so how? * How do farmers decide whether to use managed pollination service markets, and are observed use patterns optimal? * Does the provision of index-based agricultural insurance lead to resource degradation, or improvement? Although on one level these topics are unrelated, the reality is that there are similar archetypal economic problems at the root of each of these questions, where the welfare of an agricultural agent, and the impacts from their production behavior, may or may not coincide with a social optimum. In chapter 2, evidence is presented that food price shocks, particularly for staples, can have significant impacts on deforestation (particularly through increases in price levels), that such shocks can drive smallholders to expand production broadly to address internal shocks to consumption and production, and that such land use change patterns can be casually miss-attributed to cash crop markets. In chapter 3, it is demonstrated that pollination dependent farmer's crop pollination behavior may be less static than has been presumed, that crop pollination behavior and production outcomes are influenced by adjacent land use and landscape heterogeneity, that there are diminishing returns to managed pollination use, and that reliance on pollination service markets is intimately related to the farmers production technology. In chapter 4, the roll-out of a successful index-based agricultural insurance product is studied at-scale, which theoretically might lead to resource degradation, or improvement (in this case for rangeland quality), and evidence is presented that resource degradation concerns may be over-blown, lending credence to the idea that addressing missing financial markets can enhance productivity and agent's welfare without degrading fundamental natural resource stocks.

Download or read book Four Essays on Farmers Behavior when Making Insurance Grazing and Seed Decisions in the Face of Uncertainty written by Yuyuan Che and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decision-makers typically encounter at least some difficulties when making decisions about managing uncertain future outcomes. Traditional economic theory assumes that individuals seek to maximize expected profits or expected utility based on their available information. However, many studies have shown that these assumptions are violated in some cases, especially when people countenance uncertainty. Agricultural producers cannot avoid uncertainty about weather conditions, market fluctuations, and the effectiveness of technology choices when making important production decisions. A central theme of this dissertation is how agricultural producers make decisions with a particular focus on behavioral factors. The dissertation consists of four essays on farmers' decisions regarding crop insurance, rotational grazing, and seeding rates.The first essay explores whether and how farmers' crop insurance participation decisions are influenced by recent indemnity or weather events using historic federal crop insurance program data. With parametric and non-parametric methods, we find that higher past indemnities encourage farmers to participate in insurance programs and choose a higher coverage level, while prior adverse weather shocks work indirectly. We also find that the increase in participation due to indemnities peaks in the year following a loss.The second and third essays investigate how ranchers make decisions about whether to adopt rotational grazing practices. The second essay focuses on peer effects and subsidy impacts. With farm-level survey data, we apply a simultaneous-equations model to take account of endogeneity issues arising from peer effects. We find that there are significant peer effects in the adoption of rotational grazing, and that incentive policies will have multiplier effects in the long run on adoption through peer networking. The third essay investigates why ranchers who view rotational grazing as a win-win practice for both profit and the environment do not use the practice.The fourth and final essay studies how farmers' seeding rate choices respond to markets, resources, and technologies by considering a trade-off between more seeds and fewer resources allocated to each seed. Trends in seeding rates have differed between corn and soybean over the past several decades, but the underlying reasons for this have not received attention in the agronomic and economic literature. With a unique detailed U.S. farm-level market data, we find that soybean seeding rate choice is more price elastic than is that for corn, i.e., seed companies are likely to have less power in the soybean seed market. Most inputs that come with the land, and so are divided across all seeds increase corn and soybean seeding rates; while inputs that come with the seed increase corn seeding rates and decrease soybean seeding rates. As an application, we combine findings in the literature with our empirical analysis to conclude that tax or price policies that target the seed or crop will mitigate neonicotinoid-related ecological impacts.

Download or read book Three Essays in Agricultural Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays In Environmental And Agricultural Economics written by Biswo Nath Poudel and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation probes three issues of current interest in environmental and agricultural economics. The first paper provides an in-depth analysis of sedimentation management issue in large reservoirs. The paper provides a new model of sedimentation management and conditional on assumed primitives of the model, analyses different scenarios under which sedimentation removal may increase or decrease. The paper also provides insights on how temperature fluctuation, increased sedimentation arrival in the reservoir and change in the perception of large reservoirs among the public may affect the sustainability and management of the large reservoir. The second paper looks at the data from the Latin American countries to search for the presence of Environmental Kuznets Curve(EKC) in Latin America. The paper is also one of the earliest papers to use forestry data and semiparametric approach in finding EKC. The paper finds no evidence of EKC in Latin America as a whole, and in general finds that EKC is sensitive to the region of choice. The third paper carries out an an empirical investigation to test for the convergence of total factor productivity(TFP) of agricultural sector in the United States. The investigation does not find any evidence of convergence while looking at the U.S. state-level agricultural TFP at the aggregate level. However, it finds support for convergence within some of the clusters or within some of the regions. The paper takes a new approach in grouping states, which makes it different from other papers where ad hoc grouping of states was done. In this paper, such approach is abandoned in favor of a cluster analysis approach that relies on data to form "clusters". Cluster analysis approach finds that convergence in the regional level (cluster) does not improve significantly compared to the findings by a wellknown previously published study which didn't use cluster analysis approach.

Download or read book Essays in Empirical Environmental Economics written by Puja Singhal and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Natural Resource Economics Agricultural Policy and Food Policy written by Xiangrui Wang and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three independent papers in the field of Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics. The first paper is related to consumer-side water conservation policies. My coauthor and I introduce a structural water demand model based on the assumption that consumers are inattentive and apply a behavioral decision rule in water consumption. We found our model can capture our sample consumers behavior well, suggesting water conservation policies should incorporate non-price instrument to prod consumers for water saving. The second paper relates to the industrial organization and antitrust in the US beer market. My coauthor and I found that in a recent beer merger case, the justice department's divestiture requirement (a popular structural merger remedy tool) may not be effective in prevent merger brands' price from raising, at least in the short-run after the merger. This paper suggests that divestiture may fail as a merger remedy due to its certain idiosyncratic details. The third paper investigates the impact of corn production in US Midwest states on the US Reformulated Gasoline Program. We found that the US Reformulated Gasoline Program caused massive corn production in the Midwest, and the pollution from nitrogen-based fertilizer usage in agriculture reversely affect the efficacy of the Reformulated Gasoline Program, aiming to improve air quality.

Download or read book The Economics of Agriculture and Natural Resources written by Masoomeh Rashidghalam and published by Springer. This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a collection of twelve selected empirical studies on the economics of agriculture and natural resources. Twenty-two authors have contributed their research to this volume. Papers of this volume are grouped into three main domains covering: Agricultural Resilience and Sustainability; Agricultural Producers and Consumers; and Energy Use in Agriculture. Organized in an analytical framework and offering comprehensive empirical data, this book focuses on agricultural sustainability and resilience, environmental efficiency, agricultural extension, foreign trade, energy use, and agricultural growth aspects of the Iranian agriculture sector. They demonstrate technical and methodological tools used for the analysis and explain their application in the agricultural sector of Iran. This book will be a valuable read for those managing agricultural enterprises, policy makers, and researchers of agricultural producers and consumers.

Download or read book Empirical Analyses in Agricultural and Resource Economics written by Andrew William Stevens and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agriculture has played a profound and unique role in humanity's development. We are dependent on agriculture for the vast majority of our food supply, and have so far been successful at increasing agricultural production to meet rising demand. At the same time, agriculture is the largest and most direct way that humans have altered our planet's landscape and natural environment. Indeed, over half of all land in the United States is used for some agricultural purpose. In this dissertation, I explore three different aspects of human-environmental-agricultural interdependency in the United States. In the first chapter, I study agricultural workers' wage-responsiveness under different environmental conditions on California blueberry farms. In the second chapter, Fiona Burlig and I study the effect of human social networks on agricultural technology adoption in three upper-Midwestern states. Finally, in the third chapter, I study how the location of ethanol refineries in the US Corn Belt affects crop choice decisions and nutrient runoff. Each of these chapters highlights a different interaction between human economic systems (wages, social networks, renewable fuel policy), environmental conditions (temperature, nitrogen application/runoff), and agricultural enterprises (specialty crop labor productivity, adoption of fertilizer, crop rotations). I utilize a similar empirical strategy in each chapter, employing fixed effects and other panel data techniques to control for time-invariant determinants of productivity, technology adoption, and optimal crop choice, respectively. This dissertation highlights the benefits of panel data methods in agriculture, especially in the modern era of abundant micro-level data. In the first chapter, I study how agricultural laborers' productivity responds to changes in the piece rate wage they are paid: a wage paid per unit of output rather than per unit of time. Specifically, I exploit quasi-experimental variation to estimate the elasticity of labor productivity with respect to piece rate wages by analyzing a high-frequency panel of over 2,000 blueberry pickers on two California farms over three years. To account for endogeneity in the piece rate wage, I use the market price for blueberries as an instrumental variable. I find that picker productivity is very inelastic on average, and I can reject even modest elasticities of up to 0.7. However, this average masks important heterogeneity across outdoor working conditions. Specifically, at temperatures below 60 degrees Fahrenheit, I find that higher piece rate wages do in fact induce increases in labor productivity. This is suggestive evidence consistent with a model where at moderate to hot temperatures, workers face binding physiological constraints that prevent them from exerting additional effort in response to higher wages. This insight has important implications for understanding how climate change will affect the agricultural labor sector. In the second chapter, Fiona Burlig and I use historical data and a natural experiment to study the effect of social networks on agricultural technology adoption. We present a model of the effects of social network size on information and technology take-up and test its implications using a unique natural experiment in the mid-20th century US Midwest. We find that social network expansions, in the form of mergers between congregations of the American Lutheran Church, led to increased rates of agricultural technology adoption among farmers. In counties that experienced a merger, the number of farms using nitrogen fertilizer increased by over 7% and the total fertilized acreage increased by over 13% relative to counties without a merger. We provide evidence that these effects are driven by increased information sharing between farmers as a result of these congregational mergers. In the third chapter, I study how the location of ethanol refineries within the US Corn Belt affects farmers' land use decisions. Ethanol production in the United States, driven by federal renewable fuel policy, has exploded over the past two decades and has prompted the construction of many ethanol refineries throughout the US Corn Belt. These refineries have introduced a new inelastic demand for corn in the areas where they were built, reducing basis for nearby farmers and effectively subsidizing local corn production. I explore whether and to what extent the construction of new ethanol refineries has actually increased local corn acreage. I also explore some environmental effects of this acreage increase. Using a thirteen year panel of over two million field-level observations in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Nebraska, I estimate a net increase of nearly 300,000 acres of corn in 2014 relative to 2002 that can be attributed to the placements of new ethanol refineries. This increase comprises approximately 0.75% of the total 2014 corn acreage within my dataset. Furthermore, this effect is separate from the general equilibrium effect of ethanol policy increasing aggregate demand for corn. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that over 21,000 tons of the nitrogen applied to fields in my sample in 2014 can be attributed to refinery location effects. Essentially all of these observed effects occur only in areas within 30 miles of an ethanol refinery, suggesting that refineries have meaningful localized impacts on land use and environmental quality such as nitrate runoff.