Most agricultural output in the northeastern United States comes from counties that have experienced significant development. A mail survey, with 300 responses, was conducted in southeastern Pennsylvania to determine farmer adaptation to urbanization in this region. Despite development,...

This research examines the effect of risk and time preferences on forest management responses to forest tenure land reforms in Fujian, China that began in 2002. The different extent of the reform and its different timing across regions provide a natural experiment to test how time and risk...

Risk and uncertainty over the results of agricultural production were always considered as impediments for the development of agricultural sector and rural areas. Besides traditional weather and market related sources of uncertainty, agriculture in transition economies is facing one more major...

To address the question, "Should we expect government policy to be efficient?" at its roots, I modify the well-known Arrow-Debreu private ownership economy, allowing property rights to be violable. The result is that equilibria tend to be Pareto inefficient.

This paper examines whether better property rights will increase joint productivity of agricultural and timber products in the Brazilian Amazon. Farrell output-based technical efficiency and technological progress measures are derived by using DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) for Amazonian...

This paper gives a general mathematical definition of an institution, and presents an explicit formal method by which to incorporate institutions in a standard general equilibrium model. We illustrate our concept using a modified Prisoner's dilemma game in which property rights over natural...

This paper examines the extensive and intensive margin changes in land use in the U.S. likely to be induced by biofuel policies and the implications of these policies for GHG emissions over the 2007-2022 period. The policies considered here include the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) by itself as...

Agricultural biofuels require the use of scarce land, and this land has opportunity cost. We explore the objective function of a social planner who includes a land constraint in the optimization decision to minimize environmental cost. The results show that emissions should be measured on a per...

2010 AAEA Presidential Address; forthcoming in January 2011 AJAE in shortened version.

Replaced with revised version of paper 08/04/10.