Are futures prices exogenous to agricultural supply? It depends. We argue that crop yield shocks were predictable during the 1961-2007 period because high planting-time futures prices tended to indicate that yield would be below trend. This feature of the data implies that regressions of...

We propose the Grouped Coefficients estimator to reduce the bias of dynamic panels that have a multilevel structure to the coefficient and factor loading heterogeneity. If groups are chosen such that the within-group heterogeneity is small, then the grouped coefficients estimator can lead to a...

Recent econometric studies indicate that the effect of government farm subsidies on farmland rental rates may be smaller than once thought. This literature has corrected for bias due to expectation error in measured subsidy payments. We suggest two additional sources of bias—inertia and...

High corn prices cause farmers to plant more corn on fields that were planted to corn in the previous year, rather than alternating between corn and soybeans. Cultivating corn after corn requires greater nitrogen fertilizer and some of this nitrogen flows into waterways and causes environmental...

Recent studies indicate that the effect of government subsidies on rental rates for farmland may be lower than once thought and lower than predictions from theory. However, there are still a number of unresolved issues in estimating subsidy incidence econometrically. We identify three such...

The benefits from green payments for the adoption of a conservation technology or practice are reduced if the technology would have eventually been adopted regardless of the green payment. This source of additionality is likely a significant concern for some technologies subsidized by EQIP.

Recent studies have suggested that green technologies may be a cost effective way to manage urban runoff. Literature has also suggests that there needs to be a greater empirical basis to estimate the benefits associated with social values associated with urban trees; we therefore estimate...