This paper addresses the economic feasibility and impacts on U.S. agriculture of establishing a biomass crops industry capable of producing 8 quads methanol or 9.4 quads ethanol by the year 2030 from grasses grown as biomass feedstocks. The results suggest that such an industry could become...

The Comprehensive Economic Pesticide Policy Evaluation System (CEPPES), as CEEPES was originally called, was developed in 1986 under a cooperative agreement between the Office of Policy Analysis of the Environmental Protection Agency (OPA/EPA) and the Center for Agricultural and Rural...

Described in this report is the application of an integrated agro-ecological modeling system that has been constructed around Agriculture Canada's Canadian Regional Agriculture Model (CRAM) to analyze the economic and environmental impacts of proposed agricultural policies for Alberta,...

Three alternative Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) scenarios and a targeted Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP) scenario were analyzed using the Basic Linked System (BLS) of applied general equilibrium models to project their likely economic impacts on the agriculture sector of the United States....

This paper explores the implications of endogenous risk for the economic value of preventing groundwater contamination. We consider the analytical implications of endogenous risk for five key building blocks frequently used to structure studies of groundwater valuation: The probability and the...

We develop three propositions about the ex ante value of reduced risk. If there is a continuous outcome distribution and if self-protection influences outcome probability and severity, then: (1) unobservable utility terms cannot be eliminated from the ex ante value expressions; (2) knowledge of...

Analysis of alternative environmental policies often requires execution of computer simulation models of the ecological or economic phenomena involved. This paper explores efficiencies to be gained by using these simulation models in a program of constructing metamodels. Constructing a metamodel...

The public and the agricultural community are concerned with the impact of agrichemical use on the environment. Of particular concern is the impact of pesticides and nitrogen on the quality of surface and ground waters (Nielson and Lee 1987). Although a national effort is under way to address...

This paper presents a novel approach for generating information for regulatory and policy analysis, based on farmers' adoption of weed control technology. A simulation model, WISH, is used to generate cost and risk information on 258 weed control strategies. The environmental policies simulated...

Bonds have recently been promoted as an alternative tool for controlling environmental damages, particularly in those instances when the innovative activities of a firm have uncertain future impacts [Costanza and Perrings (1990)]. Under this mechanism, a firm would post a bond ex ante,...