The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) pays farmers about $2 billion per year to retire cropland under ten- to fifteen-year contracts. Recent research by Wu found that slippage—an unintended stimulus of new plantings—offsets some of CRP's environmental benefits. Wu does not account for the...

We present a new framework to identify demand and supply elasticities of agricultural commodities using yield shocks - deviations from a time trend of output per area, which are predominantly caused by weather fluctuations. Demand is identified using current-period shocks that give rise to...

Previous research finds that some environmental benefits stemming from the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) are offset by slippage: farmers simply plant more acreage to substitute for land that was idled. Our analysis shows that previous slippage estimates likely stem from spurious...

Farm-level Census data and county-level income shock data reveal that past unexpected income shocks affect the rate of change in average farm size. Average farm size increases more quickly in counties experiencing negative income shocks as compared to counties experiencing positive income...