This report summarizes the major findings of a study in which an integrated agro-ecological economic modeling system was constructed around Agriculture Canada's Canadian Regional Agriculture Model (CRAM) to analyze the economic and environmental impacts of proposed agricultural policies. The...

In this paper, we study the social efficiency of private carbon markets that include trading in agricultural soil carbon sequestration when there are significant co-benefits (positive environmental externalities) associated with the practices that sequester carbon. Likewise, we investigate the...

Land use impacts of biofuel expansion have attracted a tremendous amount of attention because of the implications for the climate, the environment, and the food supply. To examine these impacts, we set up an economic framework that links input use and land allocation decisions with ethanol and...

We examine the social efficiency of alternative intertemporal permit trading regimes. Banking with a 1-to-1 ratio and with a non-unitary intertemporal trading ratio (ITR) are compared with each other and with the no-banking permit trading regime. The more industry-wide shocks vary, and/or the...

Land use changes to sequester carbon also provide "co-benefits," some of which (for example, water quality) have attracted at least as much attention as carbon storage. The non-separability of these co-benefits presents a challenge for policy design. If carbon markets are employed, then social...

Pigouvian taxes are typically imposed in situations where there is imperfect knowledge on the extent of damage caused by a producing firm. A regulator imposing imperfectly informed Pigouvian taxes may cause the firms that should (should not) produce to shut down (produce). In this paper we use a...

The study develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the allocation of conservation funds via selectively offering incentive payments to farmers for enrolling in one of two mutually exclusive agricultural conservation programs: retiring land from production or changing farming practices on...

A regulator with a fixed budget to spend on securing environmental benefits from farmed land has to choose between how many acres to enroll and the extent of benefits to require of each enrolled acre. Here we consider, given heterogeneous land, what properties of the environmental...

We use a mechanism design framework to analyze the optimal design of green payment policies with the dual goals of conservation and income support for small farms. Each farm is characterized by two dimensions of attributes: farm size and conservation efficiency. Policymakers may not be able to...