On the nation’s largest aquifer live 2.3 million people, most of whom depend on the Ogallala’s water for household consumption, as well as for agricultural and industrial use. As the Ogallala’s levels decline, policies need to be developed to encourage conservation of this resource that...

The study evaluates the gains of avoiding data-dependent specification search on an estimation sample in an application to discrete choice models. We incorporate data splitting, the process by which the total available sample is randomly split in two or more sub-samples with the first...

Due to payoff uncertainties combined with risk aversion and/or real options, farmers may demand a premium in order to adopt conservation tillage practices, over and above the compensation for the expected profit losses (if any). We propose a method of directly estimating the financial incentives...

In this paper, we examine command-and-control (CAC) policies and market-based instruments (MBI) in the context of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). The CRP, an MBI in the form of subsidies, is by far the largest agro-environmental policy implemented to date. We compare the environmental...

In this study, we estimate empirically the multiple benefits of a subsidy policy that would offer payments to farmers in return for the adoption of conservation tillage and compare the outcomes of alternative targeting designs for such a policy. Using data for roughly 12,000 National Resource...

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...