Nutrients from municipal and agricultural sources are probable causes of a zone of hypoxic waters in the Gulf of Mexico. Costs of control between the two sources vary widely. We examine cost saving that could be obtained by allowing point sources to purchase nitrogen loss reductions from...

A deeper understanding of barriers to participation in conservation programs, including farmer transaction costs, may improve program design and implementation as well as producer outreach, and thus improve water quality. Data on perceived barriers and transaction costs from the 2012 USDA...

Conversion of native sod (grassland) to cropland in the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) is threatening important breeding habitats for migratory birds. About 50 percent of North American ducks are produced in the grasslands of the PPR, even though this habitat accounts for only ten percent of duck...

Payment programs that incentivize conservation practices on farms produce additional environmental gains only if farmers receiving payments adopt practices that they would not have adopted without the payment. For some conservation practices, the “additionality” of payments may be low if...

The main objective of this research is to propose a data-driven approach to estimate the amenity values of restoring urban forest landscapes at potential target sites. The approach allows establishing the overall price-driving time relationship between the amenity values attributable to both...

We develop a watershed-based model of green payments to examine how payments applied to different environmental performance measures compare on the basis of economic efficiency, equity, and environmental outcomes. We also explore how targeting in the specification of water quality goals (e.g.,...

Agricultural nonpoint pollution is inherently stochastic (e.g., due to weather). In theory, this randomness has implications for the choice and design of policy instruments. However, very few empirical studies have modeled natural variability. This paper investigates the importance of stochastic...

We analyze how choosing to use a particular type of instrument for agri-environmental payments, when these payments are constrained by the regulatory authority's budget, implies an underlying targeting criterion with respect to costs, benefits, participation, and income, and the tradeoffs among...