Agriculture is a source of greenhouse gas emissions that could be included as offsets in a cap-and-trade system. This paper describes offset rules that could be applied to reduced nitrogen fertilizer application on wheat, a source of nitrous oxide emissions. Unlike other papers that have...

We observe that identification of the discount rate from experimental data requires an assumption about the consumption period, the length of time over which a payment will be turned into utility-providing consumption. We show that the optimal consumption period is substantially longer than...

We elicit time-discounting behavior from U.S. farmers that are broadly known to be either late or early adopters of farming best management practices. Using a single-choice experiment, we estimate the mean discount rate for each farmer group and find that late adopters have a mean discount rate...

This paper uses a lottery-choice mechanism to measure farmer preferences over money-denominated risks. We look at the ability of these choice data to predict farming decisions for an in-person sample of 68 farmers. A coarse version of our risk preference measure has substantial explanatory power...

We model a simulated green-payment policy to reduce nitrogen application on corn. In contrast to other papers, we recognize that the farm’s business-as-usual application rate cannot be known by the policymaker. We develop a structural model and data-driven approach to address this issue. We...

Conservation payments lead to improvement in environmental quality only if farmers and ranchers who receive them adopt conservation practices that would not have been adopted without the payment. When a voluntary payment causes a change in practice(s) that lead(s) to improved environmental...

The notion of diminishing marginal value had a profound impact on the development of neoclassical theory. Early neoclassical scholars had difficulty convincing contemporaries of the new paradigm's value until political economists used the critical assumption of diminishing marginal value to link...