Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Water Rights written by Karin Audrey Donhowe and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally, in the third chapter I explore differences in Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) water management across its projects. BOR delivers water to farmers in Western states based on long-term contracts with irrigation districts that specify how much land can be irrigated, the quantity of water allotted per acre, and terms of payment. There is variation across Reclamation projects in terms of rights ownership, water allocation, and the ability to transfer water. These areas of institutional variation affect the security of farmers' claims to water, and security of rights in turn affects investment decisions, crop choice, and the value of water rights. This paper documents water management across five of the largest BOR irrigation projects and evaluates the implications of the variation.

Download or read book Three Essays in Water and Climate Economics written by Nicholas Anthony Potter and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation includes three chapters on the economics of climate, water resources, agricultural production, and conflict. Chapter one is an introduction. In chapter two I provide an analysis of the impact of exposure to temperature on returns to irrigated and nonirrigated cropland. Chapter three is a theoretical approach to understand the economic implications of the forfeiture of water rights for nonuse. Chapter four looks at the relationship between drought, conflict, and governance using a disaggregated spatial analysis.Chapter two is on temperature effects on snowpack-dependent surfacewater irrigated production systems in the western US. Irrigated production in that region is characterized by a diverse mix of high value crops, so producers may have more of an ability to adapt to hotter temperatures. I focus on county rental prices for irrigated and nonirrigated cropland and find that economic returns to cropland begin to decrease starting at about 25℗ʻC for irrigated acres and 20℗ʻC for nonirrigated acres.Chapter three covers the economic history that led to the creation of forfeiture policies for the nonuse of surface water rights in the western US. I develop a theory of water rights under prior appropriations with forfeiture and use it to examine why forfeiture policies were adopted in all western states that allocate water via prior appropriation. Forfeiture reduced risk to junior water rights holders and limited speculative water claims, but did so at the cost of increased transaction costs when trading water rights. While these were small when remaining water resources were available to be claimed, they are significantly more costly when all water in a basin has been allocated.In chapter four I combine a spatiotemporal grid of drought and geolocated conflict with several measures of governance characteristics to examine how governance mediates the relationship between drought and conflict. I find little evidence of a relationship between drought and conflict in Africa and Latin and South America. In countries that are more democratic or in which doing business is easier, an increase in drought reduces the likelihood of riot incidence. Other governance measures have no discernible effect.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Water Quality in the United States written by David Andrew Keiser and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Groundwater Extraction for Agriculture written by Lisa Marie Pfeiffer and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Water Quality and Availability written by Saman Olfati and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on U S Water Rights Markets written by Renata Rimsaite and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is composed of three essays that analyze different issues concerning water markets in the U.S. The first essay investigates whether water rights markets in the U.S. are efficient, and compares them to other natural resource markets. The second essay measures the welfare gains from transferring water to different uses and examines whether these gains are higher or lower under water stress. The third essay identifies existing barriers to efficient water rights trading by analyzing the institutional characteristics of various markets in Colorado and Texas. The focus of this dissertation is on the efficiency of water rights markets, and whether these markets can be an effective instrument in managing varying water supply resources in the western U.S.

Download or read book Economics of Water Resources written by Mary E. Renwick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Water is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity in many parts of the world. Population growth plus a growing appetite for larger quantities of cheap water quality as a result of urban, industrial, and agricultural pollution coupled with increasing environmental demands have further reduced usable suppliers. This book brings together thirty of the best economic articles addressing water scarcity issues within the US and Mexico. By touching on a number of different issues, this volume clearly articulates the need for improving existing institutional arrangements as well as for developing new arrangements to address growing water scarcity problems.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Subsidies written by Jacob A. Stockfisch and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Environmental Economics and Environmental Human Rights written by Christopher R. Jeffords and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Water Pollution Control written by Jiameng Zheng and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Water pollution poses important challenges worldwide. In developed countries, most of the challenges from water pollution have to do with recreational and amenity use of water, as well as the negative impact on ecosystems. For instance, in the United States, dead zones caused by nutrient pollution occur annually in many major coastal waters, including Tampa Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay, and coastal North Carolina, causing large welfare effects in these regions. In developed countries like the United States, the aging drinking water infrastructure, such as the presence of lead pipes, is also a threat to human health. In developing countries, water pollution has a pronounced impact on human health given that safe drinking water is limited in many areas. Economic analysis plays a critical role in the making of environmental policy. In designing and assessing a water pollution control policy, it is important to understand the costs and benefits of such policies and be able to empirically evaluate their effectiveness. However, there are still important challenges in understanding the costs and benefits of water pollution control policies. Water quality improvement is a non-market good, so no direct price signal is available for valuing it. To overcome this problem, economists have developed several non-market valuation techniques, such as hedonic property models and recreation demand models. Each valuation method only captures a piece of the price consumers are willing to pay to improve water quality. This dissertation comprises three papers that answer some critical questions on the economic analysis of water pollution policies. In the first paper, I estimate the marginal willingness-to-pay of homeowners for water quality improvement in Florida,using a two-stage model that combines the recreational value and amenity value of both local and regional water quality improvement. This paper, which focuses on nutrient pollution problems related to the dead zones discussed earlier, generates a more comprehensive estimate of the benefits of water pollution reduction than that used in prior work. In the second paper, I estimate an important cost of water pollution by investigating the short-run and long-run educational impacts of lead pollution in drinking water. Using data from Texas, I find that drinking water lead exposure at birth has a significant negative impact on both 3rd-grade standardized test scores and the high school graduation rate. While many prior papers in environmental economics quantify short-run and long-run human capital costs of air pollution, this paper is one of only a few to do so for an important water pollution problem. Switching to the third paper, I examine the existing literature on the policy instruments that can be used to reduce water pollution. With a focus on developing countries, I describe the empirical evidence on the effectiveness of various water pollution control policies, identify the challenges for implementing and assessing such policies, and provide recommendations for future research

Download or read book Essays on Economics of Water Resources Management written by Chan Chang and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on California s Water Economy written by Hilary Beth Soldati and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays that provide insights into the economics of water across different dimensions of the resource and its role in the state of California. The first essay examines the social welfare impacts of variation in irrigation supplies that are available through major public projects. Discussion of the value and significance of the irrigation services that are made available through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta often focus on the immediate impacts to agricultural production and direct farm jobs. This essay, however, considers the reach of these impacts by evaluating how agriculturally based communities are effected by shortages in irrigation supplies. The second and third essays shift attention toward urban water usage. Methods of forecasting urban water demand are reconsidered and a suggestion is made for an alternative approach to evaluating the predictive power of demand models in the second essay. Finally, the third essay measures the effect of consumption analytics and social norm messaging on household decision-making around water usage. Taken together, these three essays address some of the key features of California's water economy. While there exists much research that measures the impact of precipitation shocks on agricultural regions, whether in production or in other outcomes, less research is available that specifically focuses on the impacts of variation in developed irrigation supplies. Given that developing irrigation infrastructure is oft regarded as an adaptation strategy for climate change, it is worth understanding how shocks in the supply of managed water effect individual and regional outcomes. The first essay exploits exogenous variation in the availability of California's Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta irrigation water to estimate the impact on crime rates for the agricultural counties that use this input. This research provides suggestive evidence in support of the hypothesis that reductions in the availability of this irrigation supply lead to a socially and economically significant increase in both property and violent crime rates. Empirical results support the argument that farm jobs is the mostly likely mechanism, with suggestive evidence that demographic changes are also important. Urban water managers rely heavily on forecasts of water consumption to determine management decisions and investment choices. Typical forecasts rely on simple models whose criteria for selection has little to do with their performance in predicting out-of-sample consumption levels. This essay demonstrate this issue by comparing forecast models selected on the basis of their ability to perform well in-sample versus out-of-sample. Results highlight the benefits of developing out-of-sample evaluation criteria to ascertain model performance. Using annual data on single-family residential water consumption in Southern California, this research illustrates how prediction ability varies according to model evaluation method. Using a training dataset, this analysis finds that models ranking highly on in-sample performance significantly over-estimated consumption $(10\%-25\%)$ five years out from the end of the training dataset relative to observed demands five years out from the end of the training dataset. Whereas, the top models selected using the out-of-sample criteria came within 1\% of the actual total consumption. Notably, projections of future demand for the in-sample models indicate increasing aggregate water consumption over a 25-year period, which contrasts the downward trend predicted by the out-of-sample models. The third essay estimates how household-level water consumption may be impacted by the distribution of Home Water Use Reports (HWURs) by Dropcountr (DC), a digital and web-based consumption analytics platform. Similar to Opower in the energy sector, DC offers social comparison, consumption analytics, and conservation information to residential accounts, primarily through digital communications. Having initiated relationships with several California utilities, as well as major Texas and Colorado providers, the effect of these programs may be measured and will contribute to three areas of academic literature: 1) the study of social norms and moral suasion on consumption behavior, in general; 2) the effects of such methods in the water sector, in specific; and 3) understanding alternatives to price mechanisms in demand-side management of water resources. This research discusses the potential of this type of information to generate measurable effects of interest, both to researchers and to water managers alike. Particular focus will be given to results with a mid-sized California utility and a major Texas provider. Early results indicate an economically and statistically significant $5-8\%$ and $3-4\%$ reduction in average monthly household water consumption for the California and the Texas utility, respectively, for the typical household under treatment of the DC program.

Download or read book The Economics of Water Resources written by Agha Ali Akram and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Selected Water Resources Abstracts written by and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Water Resource Economics written by Daniel A. Brent and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A canonical example in economics of the difference between marginal and total value is the diamond-water paradox. The high price of diamonds is derived from their rarity; whereas the price of water is low due to its abundance, even though it is essential to sustain human life. Scarcity, rather than abundance, better characterizes water availability for many people and this dissertation studies how applied economic principles can be utilized to manage water resources. The first chapter estimate the costs of water volatility in the agricultural sector through a hedonic analysis of heterogeneous water rights. Security for water rights is capitalized into the value of agricultural land, which informs the magnitude and distributional welfare effects of droughts. Tests for an endogenous changepoint fails find a time-varying price premium, indicating that the costs of increased water volatility due to climate change are not manifested in agricultural property markets. The second and third chapters focus on economic and behavioral incentives in urban municipal water demand. Chapter 2 presents a disaggregated model of water demand to separately estimate intensive and extensive margin demand elasticity. Identification is achieved through a novel method merging remotely sensed satellite data on vegetative cover with water metering records. The time series of vegetative cover captures changes in landscape over time and identifies the extensive margin elasticity - a parameter that has only been estimated implicitly through the difference in short run and long run demand. Households that maintain green lawns are less responsive to prices than households either change landscapes or have a mixed landscape. Higher water rates increase the probability of converting to low water-intensive landscapes, which in turn is a major driver of long-run demand. The extensive margin with respect to changing landscapes comprises 7%-48% of total elasticity for households with significant outdoor water use. The final chapter examines the impact of non-pecuniary incentives stemming from the behavioral economics literature on water demand. In a randomized field experiment social comparisons are found to significantly decrease water demand with substantial heterogeneity both across and within utilities. The utility with the highest average treatment effect saved three times as much water in percentage terms as the utility with the lowest average treatment effect. Higher users are more responsive to the program and there are important interactions between social norms and existing utility conservation programs. Water resources face stress due to population growth, rising incomes, and climate change and these stressors will only increase in the future. This dissertation addresses several key issues in agricultural and residential that aim to increase knowledge and aid public policy of managing water resources in times of scarcity.

Download or read book Three Essays on Environmental Economics written by Dale S. Rothman and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Economic Role of Government written by Warren J. Samuels and published by Springer. This book was released on 1992-06-18 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of articles examines the fundamental non-ideological conceptions and relationships consutituting the economic role of government, especially in market economies. The fundamental concepts include the nature of economic policy and the problem of order in economic affairs.