Demand for liquid fuels (i.e., petroleum products) has burdened the U.S. with major challenges, including national security and economic concerns stemming from rising petroleum imports; impacts of global climate change from rising emissions of CO2; and continued public health concerns from...

The Environmental Protection Agency requires concentrated animal feeding operations to develop and implement a comprehensive nutrient management plan. Changes in manure management to meet nutrient application standards will increase production costs. Some of these costs can be offset by savings...

Water quality trading between point and nonpoint sources is of great interest as an alternative to strict command and control regulations on point sources for achieving water quality goals. The expectation is that trading will reduce the costs of water quality protection, and may speed...

The purpose of this research is to examine the following research question: how has enforcement of Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) adapted to the Big Box business system innovation? Additionally, the study explored the possible nature of regulatory choke points that may emerge from...

Risk aversion is a key element of utility maximizing hedge strategies; however, it hastypically been assigned an arbitrary value in the literature. This paper instead applies a GARCH-in-Mean (GARCH-M) model to estimate a time-varying measure of riskaversion that is based on the observed risk...

This dissertation studies strategies to mitigate the risks associated with operational and strategic decisions of a firm, particularly focusing on project management, product development and procurement decisions. In the first essay we develop two simulation-based methods to evaluate risky...

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) offers preservationists a unique tool with the potential to revolutionize hazard mitigation for historic resources. The program’s ability to link information to a specific geographical location and efficiently disperse this information can solve two of...

Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) require electricity providers to supply a minimum fixed percentage or total quantity of customer load from designated renewable energy resources by a given date. These policies have become increasingly prevalent in the past decade as state governments seek to...

Crop insurance and hedging are two risk management strategies used by farmers to manage risk. Using a discrete choice model and farm-level data, this study investigates the factors influencing farmers' use of hedging and crop insurance as risk management strategies. In the case of crop...

The Harvest Cost-Revenue Estimator, a financial model, was used to examine the cost sensitivity of forest biomass harvesting scenarios to targeted policies designed to stimulate wildfire hazardous fuel reduction projects. The policies selected represent actual policies enacted by federal and...