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

Scientists predict that global warming will cause suitable habitat ranges to shift for many plant species, including blue oak in California. If proximity to particular land cover types significantly affects human welfare, any such shifts will affect household welfare, resulting in an indirect...

This study examines how the U.S. crop mix pattern has responded to climate and in turn the potential effects of projected climate change. We find that there are significant effects of temperature and precipitation on the crop choice decisions.

Under the Kyoto protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change the United States is charged with reducing emissions of greenhouse gases to seven percent below their 1990 levels by the period 2008-2012. These reductions could be met from many industries including...

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...

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

For mixed cereal-livestock farmers, cereal production provides a bundle of goods. Grain is consumed by the household or sold at market, and crop residues are used as livestock feed. The straw component of crop residue can be bought and sold at market and therefore has a well-established local...

In the vicinity of a city, farmers are confronted with increasing agricultural land prices and rents along the rural-urban gradient, but they concurrently enjoy the advantages associated with proximity to a larger and wealthier consumer base. We hypothesize that farmers transition from...