This study examines the decoupled nature of direct payments and counter-cyclical payments to determine if they have an impact on U.S. rice area harvested. A naïve expectations model was specified, with the results indicating that direct payments are decoupled; however, counter-cyclical are not....

The biofuel industry has been rapidly growing around the world in recent years. Several papers have used general equilibrium models and addressed the economy-wide and environmental consequences of producing biofuels at a large scale. They mainly argue that since biofuels are mostly produced from...

Agricultural and energy commodity prices have traditionally exhibited relatively low – even negative correlation. However, the recent increases in biofuel production have altered the agriculture-energy relationship in a fundamental way. The amount of corn utilized for ethanol production in the...

Biofuels have been widely promoted as an important part of the global energy mix, due to public interest in alternative energy sourcing and a potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Concurrently, questions have been raised about the social and environmental costs of biofuel production....

We study the effects of the property tax base shock caused by natural gas drilling in the Barnett Shale in Texas–a state that taxes oil and gas wells as property. Over the boom and bust in drilling, housing appreciation closely followed the oil and gas property tax base, which expanded the...

The paper examines the renewable energy adoption and system size determinants for Californian farmers. We utilize a double-hurdle methodology where system size is determined through a heteroskedastic ordered binary variable model for four size categories. Our results for system size show that...

Steel is used as a case study to decompose the links between primary and secondary markets, in order to examine how prices in the one market influence the prices in the other, and how volatility can be transmitted between them.