While biofuels may yield renewable fuel benefits, there could be downsides in terms of water quality and other environmental stressors, particularly if corn is relied upon exclusively as the feedstock. In this article, we describe a modeling system that links agricultural land use decisions in...

Land retirement and other agricultural conservation actions contribute greenhouse gas offsets and water quality improvements and reduce erosion and nitrogen runoff. Shifting the programmatic focus to carbon would enhance C sequestration and reduce nitrogen runoff, but would likely increase erosion.

A watershed based model, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), along with transfer coefficients is used to assess alternative principles of allocating nutrient load reduction in the Raccoon River watershed in central Iowa. Four principles are examined for their cost-effectiveness and...

The paper presents two simple models of dynamic consumer behavior, both taking into consideration the implications for welfare measurement when agents can delay transactions while obtaining additional information. One model studies the effect when a purchased good is non-perishable and can be...

In this paper, we examine the design of permit trading programs when the objective is to minimize the cost of achieving an ex ante pollution target, that is, one that is defined in expectation rather than an ex post deterministic value. We consider two potential sources of uncertainty, the...

The optimal pollution permit trading system is examined when the regulator, faced with incomplete information on firms’' abatement costs and delivery coefficients, seeks to minimize expected total abatement costs to meet an ex ante pollution target. Intuitively, we find that the optimal trading...

To value water quality improvements in the Chesapeake Bay or elsewhere, it is necessary to choose an appropriate model of consumer behavior. A number of different travel cost based recreation demand models have beenemployed to value changes in water quality or beach access. Among the possible...

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...

This study empirically investigates environmental benefits at the watershed level from conservation practices, which are typically non-linear. A conservation tillage adoption model is linked to the Soil and Water Assessment Tool model to examine the effectiveness of various conservation policies...