Irrigation in the Eastern US receives little attention compared to the West, but farmers in humid states of the US, traditionally reliant on rainfall, have more than tripled irrigation since 1978. We examine this trend in Illinois where there has been a nearly threefold increase in center pivot...

Global climate change is already impacting water resources and, in many areas, reducing the amount of water available for drinking, sanitation, and agriculture. Water conservation can be a means to mitigate the economic damages associated with water scarcity, including scarcity arising from...

This paper proposes an analytic representation of perturbations in heterogeneous agent economies with aggregate shocks. Treating the underlying distribution as an explicit state variable, a single value function defined on an infinite-dimensional state space provides a fully recursive...

We propose a general simulation-based procedure for estimating quality of approximate policies in heterogeneous-agent equilibrium models, which allows to verify that such approximate solutions describe a near-rational equilibrium. Our procedure endows agents with superior knowledge of the future...

The incorporation of increasing returns and imperfect competition into applied general-equilibrium (AGE) models, beginning with Harris (1984), led to much larger welfare effects from changes such as trade liberalization. But the imperfect competition side of these IO developments has often...

Agricultural producers make investment decisions based on beliefs about future returns. This article investigates how changes in beliefs about input availability affects the adoption of conservation practices. We develop a theoretical model to examine how a producer's beliefs about water...

Nitrogen (N) fertilizer use in agricultural production is a significant determinant of surface water quality. As climate changes, agricultural producers are likely to adapt at extensive and intensive margins in terms of land and per acre input use, including fertilizers. These changes can affect...

New technologies allow perfect detection of environmental violations at near-zero marginal cost, but take-up is low. We conducted a field experiment to evaluate enforcement of water conservation rules with smart meters in Fresno, CA. Households were randomly assigned combinations of enforcement...

Water suppliers are showing greater interest in using different mechanisms to promote conservation. One such mechanism is conducting home water audits, which involves assessing water use and providing tailored suggestions for conserving water for residential customers. Yet, very little is known...

We compare the behavior and welfare effects of two popular interventions for resource conservation. The first intervention is social comparison reports (SC), which primarily provide consumers with information motivating behavioral change. The second intervention is real-time feedback (RTF),...