This paper extends first-best analysis of anti-sprawl policies, such as development taxes, and examines the welfare effects of development taxes in the presence of urban decline at the city core. We find that anti-sprawl policies generate several important feedbacks within the urban system, generating additional welfare gains and affecting the level of urban decline and suburban sprawl. Further, the optimal development tax exceeds the (first-best) Pigouvian level, irrespective of whether or not revenues are returned lump-sum to all landowners or earmarked for urban decline mitigation.

Wheat types may be classified according to strength, a baking characteristic. Since the demand for wheat is derived demand, the baking characteristic is directly related to end use. Accordingly, the wheat classes that are used in this study are divided into sub-groups according to strength, that is, strong, medium, and weak wheats. Time-series methods are employed to determine how the different classes of wheats are related within each sub-group. The different wheats under the different sub-groups are found to be substitutes to various degrees, but form a robust cointegrating relationship, implying that the wheat prices in these markets are bound together by a long-term equilibrium relationship. Within each of the sub-groups, the U.S. wheats were found to act as a price leader, driving the prices of other wheats belonging in the same sub-group. These U. S. wheats were found to form no long-run relationship between each other given their distinct end uses. The study highlights the importance of differentiating wheat by end use to specify price linkages more accurately.

Recent work in regional science, geography, and urban economics has advanced spatial modeling of land markets and land use by incorporating greater spatial complexity, including multiple sources of spatial heterogeneity, multiple spatial scales, and spatial dynamics. Doing so has required a move away from relying solely on analytical models to partial or full reliance on computational methods that can account for these added features of spatial complexity. In the first part of the paper, we review economic models of urban land development that have incorporated greater spatial complexity, focusing on spatial simulation models with spatial endogenous feedbacks and multiple sources of spatial heterogeneity. The second part of the paper presents a spatial simulation model of exurban land development using an auction model to represent household bidding that extends the traditional Capozza and Helsley (1990) model of urban growth to account for spatial dynamics in the form of local land use spillovers and spatially heterogeneous land characteristics.

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.

As a result of economies of size, food processors are generally large and few in number. These characteristics put processors at a bargaining advantage over independent farmers. Marketing cooperatives were established to counter the uneven bargaining position of individual farmers. This article investigates the relative bargaining strength of one milk marketing cooperative and several fluid milk processors. The Nash bargaining model can be used to analyze the negotiated price in the Florida fluid milk market which acts like a bilateral monopoly. The milk marketing cooperatives have bargained well with the milk marketing processors; The monthly bargaining strength of the Southeast Dairy Cooperative, Inc. (SDC), exceeds the monthly bargaining strength of the processors in all twelve months, ranging from a low of 0.6664 in January to a high of 0.7831 in September. The monthly average bargaining strength across all months for SDC is 0.7326.

Senegalese consumers prefer milk-based dairy products that are local and fresh to ones produced with imported powder. However, prices for fresh-milk-based and powder-based products are not significantly different. I address this puzzle by first confirming the preference using choice-based conjoint data to evaluate whether Senegalese consumers will pay a significant positive premium for fresh local products. I then identify price determinants using a unique dataset of milk product characteristics. The results verify the Senegalese preference for fresh local dairy products and show that consumers' misinformation regarding product composition prevents them from allocating a higher price to local milk-based products.

We determine the production risk effects and welfare implications of single-trait Bt corn adoption in the Philippines. We use a stochastic production function estimation approach that allows for examining the skewness effects of Bt within a damage abatement specification. Our results indicate that Bt corn has a statistically significant yield increasing, risk-increasing (i.e., variance-increasing) and downside risk-reducing (i.e., skewness-increasing) effects. Based on risk premium, certainty equivalent, and loss probability welfare measures, Bt corn farmers in the Philippines are better-off (in absolute terms) relative to non-Bt farmers given Bt corn's dominant yield increasing effect and downside risk-reducing effect.

It is impossible for me to begin this short talk with anything other than a heartfelt thank-you to the members of this association for making me the recipient of this year's Award for Outstanding Public Service Through Economics. I'm not the kind of person who gets awards and, as with many of the honors given to government figures in Washington, DC, from which I hail, it's undeserved! You should note, however, that I came to Halifax yesterday afternoon to be sure I was here to receive the award today, so I hope you know how pleased and honored I am to be here.

We analyze the impacts of agricultural subsidies on farm-level production decisions and input use under price, yield, and policy uncertainty for a risk-averse farmer. Using U.S. farm-level data and weighted ordinary least squares, we find that decoupled payments had little impact on agricultural chemical expenditures (our proxy for use) when the payments were first introduced in 1996. However, after 2004 there is a positive, significant relationship between decoupled payments and agricultural chemical expenditures. The results suggest that updating, introduced in 2002, and expectations of future updating caused decoupled payments to become coupled to current input use and, ultimately, production.

U.S. farmers are faced with growing environmental concerns and rising costs associated with highly specialized farming operations. They are searching for farming systems that are both ecologically sound and economically viable. They are searching for sustainable systems of farming.

This study evaluates first- and second-best trading policies for regulating watershed phosphorus under asymmetric information. The trading policies are differentiated on the degree to which regulators observe point and nonpoint source abatement efforts. The efficiency losses attributable to these informational asymmetries and those of the second-best policies can be measured in social welfare, and provide regulators the shadow value of foregoing first-best measures. Given representative monitoring costs from national water monitoring programs, it is shown that under asymmetric information, the chosen second-best trading policies outperform first-best policies by 11% in the control of watershed nutrient pollution.

Economic studies of changes in property rights institutions have been hampered by the use of ideal types. Conceptually we usually identify a small number of discrete property rights regimes, e.g., “open-access,” “common property” and “private property,” and then try to comprehend our data in terms of these categories. But in the so-called real world ideal types are seldom encountered. Instead we usually see complex mixtures of assorted arrangements, all growing or declining or mixing or separating at different rates and in different directions. Models containing nothing but ideal-type concepts are ill-suited to the analysis of such a reality. In this paper I want to examine a case of institutional change where one institutional regime was transformed into another; not by a discrete jump from one system to another, but through a gradual process of institutional adaptation and transition.

Research on the efficiency of dairy farming in New Zealand is limited and has focused predominantly on technical efficiency. We contribute to the literature on empirical analysis by examining cost efficiency of New Zealand dairy farms. We construct simplified translog stochastic cost frontiers based on an unbalanced panel of 824 farms. Average cost efficiency is estimated at 83 percent for dairy farms in the North Island and 80 percent for farms in the South Island. Our analysis of the relationship between inefficiency and farm characteristics suggests significant associations between cost efficiency and capital intensity, livestock quality, and farm size.

The beverage sector plays an important role in consumers' daily diet. Recent declines in fruit beverage and soft drink consumption may be a reflection of changing consumers' lifestyles and perceptions. This study uses recent scanner data to develop a demand analysis to examine the competition of various beverages. To obtain reliable demand and elasticity estimates, we test for valid aggregations using the generalized composite commodity theorem. Results suggest that while consumers substitute refrigerated juice with low calorie drinks, a larger proportion of consumers substitute regular soft drinks with fruit drinks.

In this article, we examine the joint influence of land access and gender of household head on household food insecurity by employing a logit model and using data from the 2015/2016 Nigerian General Household Survey. Our results show that female-headed households (FHHs) are more food insecure than male-headed households. However, with a 1-acre increase in their access to land, FHHs are 16 percent less likely to be food insecure. This finding provides policy insights into how improving access to arable land for land-poor FHHs can enhance food security in Nigeria.

Using unique panel data on individual transactions between buyers and sellers in the spot market for live hogs, we found a large degree of intra-day price dispersion. Motivated by this empirical puzzle, we offer an explanation which is rooted in the bargaining with search theory. We formulate three hypotheses involving the role of farmers’ search cost, bargaining parties’ patience, and asymmetric information that we believe can explain the observed phenomenon. Empirical analysis shows strong support for all three of the stated theoretical predictions, indicating that the bargaining with search theory explains at least 31 percent of the observed intra-day price variation in this market.

The main objective of this research is to compare estimates of technical efficiency obtained from the stochastic frontier approach for two samples of farmers of private and water user associations in the Nefzaoua Oases region (Tunisia), which are characterized by a severe scarcity of water and especially a high degree of salinity. Technical inefficiency effects are modeled as a function of farm-specific socioeconomic factors. Results suggest that both systems are technically inefficient. On average, the private system is found to be slightly more efficient than the associative one. Date yield could be explained mainly by four variables: water quantity applied per palm tree, labor per palm tree, phosphate per palm tree, and water salinity. Output elasticities of all inputs are found to be positive and significant except for the farmyard manure. Water salinity has a considerable negative impact on date productivity. For the technical inefficiency model, none of the socioeconomic variables seem to matter.

Problems of aggregation plague applications of microeconomics. The theory is derived from postulates of behavior of individuals, but we often have data only for groups of individuals. The economics of outdoor recreation is no exception. This paper addresses the aggregation issue for estimating the demand for outdoor recreation. What are the estimation and welfare implications of using individual vs. aggregated observations, if the latter is all we have?

Propensity score matching is used to estimate treatment effects when data are observational. Results presented in this study demonstrate the use of propensity score matching to evaluate the average treatment effect of unit-based pricing of household trash for reducing municipal solid waste disposal. Average treatment effect of the treated for 34 New Hampshire communities range from an annual reduction of 631 pounds per household to 823 pounds per household. This represents an annual reduction of 42 percent to 54 percent from an average of 1530 pounds per household if a town did not adopt municipal solid waste user fees.

This paper examines heterogeneity in the preferences for OHV recreation by applying the random parameters Poisson model to a data set of off-highway vehicle (OHV) users at four National Forest sites in North Carolina. The analysis develops estimates of individual consumer surplus and finds that estimates are systematically affected by the random parameter specification. There is also substantial evidence that accounting for individual heterogeneity improves the statistical fit of the models and provides a more informative description of OHV riders.