Concerns about the impact of farm production on the quality of the Nation's drinking and recreational water resources have risen over the past 10 years. Because point sources of pollution were controlled first, agricultural nonpoint sources have become the Nation's largest remaining single...

A multitude of design decisions influence the performance of voluntary conservation programs. This Economic Brief is one of a set of five exploring the implications of decisions policymakers and program managers must make about who is eligible to receive payments, how much can be received, for...

Many conservation programs, such as the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), use indices to select offers. When modeling how changes in the index weights effect program outcomes, one must account for the attributes of available land, and which landowners chose to participate. This paper...

This paper considers the use of multi-year data in travel cost analysis. To exploit the information embedded within intertemporal data, two broad approaches are examined: multiple year cross sections and panel models. Multiple year cross sections can be used to detect trends, and to test for...

U.S. farmers and ranchers produce a wide variety of commodities for food, fuel, and fiber in response to market signals. Farms also contain significant amounts of natural resources that can provide a host of environmental services, including cleaner air and water, flood control, and improved...

The TOBIT estimator of the linear model is commonly used to control for censoring. However, when predicting either demand or consumer surplus, simply substituting the resulting coefficient estimates back into the linear functional form is incorrect. This failure stems from the non-linear impact...

This article examines the importance and value of attending the annual summer conference of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) by U.S. Federal government economists. A choice-based conjoint analysis of government funding of five research-facilitating resources, including...

The objective of this research is to value soil conservation's impact on reservoirs. Using a model based on replacement cost, we estimate the benefits gained by marginal decreases in soil erosion for more than 75,000 reservoirs across the contiguous States. We aggregate benefits across the...

Application of the tobit model to estimate economic welfare is transferred from the consumer side to the producer side. Supply functions are estimated for multioutput irrigators in the Pacific Northwest. Empirical procedures are then developed for computing expected producer's surplus from the...

Many of the Nation’s conservation programs seek to achieve multiple environmental objectives. Implementing a multi-objective program efficiently requires program managers to balance different environmental and cost objectives. A number of conservation programs use an index approach to...