Operating cost efficiency is evaluated on Pennsylvania dairy farms using a modification of the Farrell efficient unit isoquant frontier method. Evaluating farms by herd size groups, the average measure of cost efficiency ranged from 70 to 80 percent. Farms with larger herds were more homogeneous in efficiency than farms with smaller herds. Regression analysis was used to evaluate for differences in cost efficiency by herd size group.

Understanding willingness to harvest (WTH) is essential to assessing the social availability of woody biomass from private land. Currently, the only economically feasible way to harvest woody biomass is in conjunction with sawlogs. We examined WTH sawlogs and woody biomass from owners of family forests using data from a survey of Missouri forest owners. While their WTH increased with revenue expected from woody biomass, revenue expected from sawlogs was a stronger influence. Incentive payments for woody biomass thus are unlikely to increase its supply, and the social availability of woody biomass will remain limited unless sawlog prices rise significantly.

This study uses an experiment where ferry passengers are sold hotel room “views” to evaluate the impact of wind turbines views on tourists’ vacation experience. Participants purchase a chance for a weekend hotel stay. Information about the hotel rooms was limited to the quality of the hotel and its distance from a large wind turbine, as well as whether or not a particular room would have a view of the turbine. While there was generally a negative effect of turbine views, this did not hold across all participants, and did not seem to be effected by distance or hotel quality.

A qualitative ranking method, Q methodology, was used to assess stakeholder priorities for socioecological services derived from coastal marshes and communities. The goal was to reveal strength of concerns for and tradeoffs among effects of coastal resilience strategies. Factor analysis identified three perspectives that formed a spectrum from high to low priorities on intangible services. Academic and government stakeholders were more likely than local residents to prioritize intangible services, but stakeholder views were diverse. A collaborative learning process promoted some alignment of views and academics showed the most movement – towards residents’ perspectives. Q-sort appeared effective at efficiently synthesizing broad concerns.

This study extends the joint estimation of revealed and stated preference data literature by accounting for truncation in the revealed preference data. The analytical model and estimation procedure are used to estimate the value of recreational red snapper fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. This recreational red snapper valuation is decomposed into its direct and indirect components. As expected, the value of recreational red snapper fishing using the joint revealed-stated preference model proposed in this analysis is bracketed on the upper limit by the value obtained using the contingent valuation method and on the lower limit by the travel cost method. The results also indicate that the joint model improves the precision of estimated recreational red snapper valuation.

Social desirability (SD) represents the problem of subjects responding with social norms rather than individual values. This paper briefly surveys the SD literature and considers its relevance for contingent valuation (CV) studies. In an empirical study, undergraduate students were administered the Mariowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, as well as CV questions. High SD scores were hypothesized to imply a greater likelihood of offering a protest reason for a zero bid and to increase bids for socially desirable commodities. While all hypotheses were not supported, the empirical results suggest that SD can influence CV responses and should not be dismissed prematurely.

A 2007 food-borne illness incident involving peanut butter is linked with structural change in consumer demand. Compensated and uncompensated own- and cross-price elasticities and expenditure elasticities were calculated for leading brands before and after the product recall using the Barten synthetic model and weekly time-series data from 2006 through 2008. Statistically significant differences in price elasticities for the affected brand, Peter Pan, were absent. After a period of 27 weeks, this brand essentially recovered from the food safety crisis. Significant differences in price elasticities were evident among non-affected brands. Hence, spillover effects and heightened competition are associated with the recall.

Converting coastal waters to farmed production of seafood may generate conflicts with other resource users. This study explores the impact of marine aquaculture development on coastal homeowners. Using single-family home sales from 2012–2014 and spatial data on coastal aquaculture activity, we employ hedonics to assess the impacts of mariculture development in three study areas of Maine, USA. Our results suggest modest impacts on residential property values with significant spatial variation across study areas. This spatial variation represents a challenge for managers and highlights the potential benefits from coordinating the development of aquaculture to balance resource users' objectives with industry growth.

Of twenty-three agricultural economics conjoint analyses conducted between 1990 and 2001, seventeen used interval-rating scales, with estimation procedures varying widely. This study tests cardinality assumptions in conjoint analysis when interval-rating scales are used, and tests whether the ordered probit or two-limit tobit model is the most valid. Results indicate that cardinality assumptions are invalid, but estimates of the underlying utility scale for the two models do not differ. Thus, while the ordered probit model is theoretically more appealing, the two-limit tobit model may be more useful in practice, especially in cases with limited degrees of freedom, such as with individual-level conjoint models.

Growing evidence of surface-water and groundwater contamination has led to demands for federal and state water quality protection policies. Agriculture will be an important target of such policies. Numerous instances of surface-water and groundwater contamination by pesticides and fertilizers have been recorded, and one study estimates that the drinking water of 50 million people in the U.S. is potentially contaminated by agricultural chemicals (Hallberg, Nielsen and Lee).

In conjunction with technologies such as horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing has transformed U.S. and world energy outlooks by adding reserves from unconventional resources. Fracturing was developed by experimentation and experience. This study empirically analyzes fracturing data for wells in the Williston Basin in North Dakota and Montana, focusing on firms' ability to improve well production over time through collaboration. Results suggest that producers gain from experience with fracturing and that proprietary additives are not generally correlated with greater production but have value for some firms. Experiential gains are stronger for operators than for contractors, but some operator-contractor pairings have productive value.

I directly estimate the acre-for-acre impact of crop insurance participation on Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) enrollment at the county level. The government may be sponsoring competing interests if subsidized insurance expands production at the expense of CRP. I employ an instrumental variables technique to correct for endogeneity in insurance decisions. Results suggest that an additional 1,000 acres insured reduces CRP enrollment by about three acres, though effect sizes vary by region. Local policy initiatives such as conservation compliance incentives could help offset local environmental consequences of converting land from CRP to insured production.

With decades of behavioral economic research now achieving prominence, the last decade has seen the advent of behavioral policymaking. These efforts have been widely seen as successful in that they achieve policy goals without inducing backlash on the part of policy targets. Behavioral policies create a unique challenge to welfare analysis that has not been sufficiently addressed in the literature. The existence of behavioral effects creates a paradox, at once justifying the use of paternalistic policies and undermining the empirical foundations of welfare analysis. In this paper I explore the behavioral welfare paradox and its implications for economic policy prescription.

We explore the effects of recommended play and the presentation of payoff information on behavior in an ambient-based policy instrument experiment. Specifically, we test the effects of recommended play (via a description of marginal decision making) and a payoff table on the behavior of individuals facing an ambient-based policy instrument. We find that recommended play and the presentation of a payoff table increases the use of the socially optimal strategy, thereby increasing efficiency. These results suggest that providing decision makers with a richer description of the decision making environment significantly reduces decision error, significantly improving the efficiency of ambient-based policy instruments.

We find distiller's dried grains with solubles (DDGS) prices to be positively correlated with both corn and soybean meal prices in the long run. However, neither corn nor soybean meal prices respond to deviations from this long-run relationship. We also identify strong time-varying dynamic conditional correlations between the markets, with the correlation between DDGS and corn strengthened after the expansion of ethanol production. There also appear to exist significant volatility spillovers from both the corn and soybean meal markets to the DDGS market, with the impact from corn shocks much larger compared to soybean meal shocks.

In this paper we develop tools and intuition for portfolio optimization for multiple conservation objectives. We show it is more efficient to optimize a conservation portfolio for multiple goods jointly, allowing planners to exploit information about multiple dimensions of correlations between goods. We identified a new type of correlation that is important for optimal conservation planning of multiple objectives under uncertainty: scenario correlation between objectives in a given part of the landscape. The conservation planner faces a different kind of problem if the objectives at hand respond similarly rather than differently to climate shocks in subregions of the planning area.

The National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM) program data underlies estimates of the volume of recreation use of the National Forest System. The data also enable estimation of both the local economic contributions and nonmarket benefits of that visitation. Applications include evaluating the effects of natural disasters, site characteristics, and climate change, as well as expenditure and benefit transfers. This article describes the history and science background of the NVUM program, outlines the methods used in estimating market and nonmarket economic outcomes, and lists some examples of results found in the literature.

This paper explores the use of functional benefits transfer to forecast the effects of waste sites on property values. The results of a meta-analysis of hedonic studies of waste sites are coupled with spatial analysis techniques to produce estimates of the effects of toxic contamination in Areas of Concern (AOCs) in the U.S. Great Lakes. Based on U.S. Census data for median home values, the methods used here suggest that approximately S5.2 billion (2005 dollars) have been lost in residential property values surrounding twenty-three of the AOCs. This compares to estimates that place the cost of remediation of all U.S. AOCs at up to $4.5 billion (2005 dollars). The case study also identifies issues surrounding the use of a meta-analysis with hedonic property value studies to support functional transfer.

Design of government policies that seek greater adoption of anaerobic digesters can benefit from a greater understanding of the motivations for adoption. Using a nationwide survey of U.S. dairy and swine producers, this study seeks to determine how policies, peer group influences, environmental beliefs, and farm characteristics affect the decision to adopt a digester. Results suggest that neighborhood effects, farm type and size, and nonmarket benefits of anaerobic digestion are important for predicting whether or not a producer will consider this technology for manure management. However, the decision to actually adopt is more dependent on government policies and economic considerations.

This paper attempts to ascertain the requirements (in terms of ownership of factors of production) for successful adaptation to the Green Revolution in Indian agriculture. We estimate stochastic production frontiers for wheat in two Indian states: Haryana (which has been significantly affected by the Green Revolution) and Madhya Pradesh (where the Green Revolution has had much less effect). In Haryana, but not in Madhya Pradesh, larger farm size and ownership of land and machines positively influence technical efficiency. Thus, with the Green Revolution advancing, land consolidation and vesting of clear ownership rights of land and capital with farmers becomes important.