Government programs that help agricultural producers manage risk may have environmental consequences. In recent years, premium subsidies for crop insurance have been increased substantially to encourage greater producer participation. Using detailed, producer-level crop insurance contract data...

Economists usually assume that the private ethical system of individuals is Utilitarian. However, one finds a much broader range of ethical positions in the environmental ethics literature. Moreover, environmental policy debates seem to elicit alternative ethical systems. It would therefore seem...

In a seeming paradox, bluegrass seed production in the State of Washington increased following imposition of a statewide ban on stubble burning in 1996. Despite forecasts that alternative production practices would increase the cost of producing bluegrass seed so much that the industry would be...

We construct a stochastic dual model to investigate the structural adjustment of three aggregate input and two aggregate output categories in U.S. agriculture under climatic change uncertainty. A century of national annual data (1910-2011) is used in the empirical analysis. Independent and...

This paper reports meta-regressions of substitution elasticities between greenhouse-gas (GHG) polluting and nonpolluting inputs in agricultural production. We treat energy, fertilizer, and manure collectively as the “polluting input” and labor, land, and capital as nonpolluting inputs. We...

Will nitrogen soil testing improve groundwater quality enough to decrease the demand for direct regulation? This question is addressed using a dynamic simulation model of irrigated agriculture in eastern Oregon. Results indicate that soil testing reduces applied nitrogen, increases farm profits...

We offer a decentralized solution to the asymmetric information and hidden action problems in the nonpoint source (NPS) pollution case. Farmers in the same watershed generate homogeneous NPS pollution. The regulator, R, pays for (or represents a group of point-source, PS, polluters who pay for)...

Many firms anticipate that a cap on greenhouse gas emissions will eventually be imposed, either through an international agreement like the Kyoto protocol or through domestic policy, and have started to take voluntary actions to reduce their emissions. If agricultural producers participate in...

Several authors have argued that the second-best environmental tax on a "dirty good" is less than the marginal emission damage associated with its consumption. These studies limit their analysis to cases in which emissions can only be reduced by a proportional reduction of the "dirty" good. With...

A hedonic price model suggests that flooding and erosion hazards, and the actions taken against them, are major determinants of property values in American coastal areas. A zoning ordnance against new construction within the 60-year erosion hazard area would increase property values and perhaps...