The paper estimates the impacts of risk reducing government programs on the use of conservation practices in agriculture. Specifically, conservation tillage or no-till agriculture can be used to reduce risk from weather shocks while subsidized crop insurance and disaster payments also reduce...

The adoption of conservation tillage practices such as ridge till, mulch till, or no-till has been shown to reduce soil erosion. An additional benefit of these conservation practices is that they also increase soil moisture. Therefore, these practices appear to be a method that agricultural...

The paper combines panel data techniques with spatial analysis to measure the impact of extreme weather events on the adoption of conservation tillage. Zellner’s SUR technique is extended to spatial panel data to correct for cross-sectional heterogeneity, spatial autocorrelation, and...

The U.S hog production industry has been continually subjected to rapid structural changes since the early 1990s. The industry's move towards more concentrated large hog farms and geographical concentration of such farms, have triggered public concerns over the dangers such big animal feeding...

Government subsidies on electricity used for pumping groundwater by agricultural irrigators has long been suspected to be an important reason for overexploitation of aquifers in Mexico. We hypothesize that institutional arrangements that exacerbate non-excludability of groundwater also matter....