n 2012, EPA turned down request to suspend the US ethanol mandate on the ground that doing so would not result in lower corn prices. Given that ethanol pro- duction accounts for more than 40 percent of the US annual corn harvest together with current trend of extreme weather events, it is likely...

Using farm-level panel data from recent U.S. Agricultural Censuses, this study examines how direct government payments influence the survival of farm businesses, paying particular attention to the differential effect of payments across farm-size categories. A Cox proportional hazards model is...

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) pays farmers about $2 billion per year to retire cropland under ten- to fifteen-year contracts. Recent research by Wu found that slippage-an unintended stimulus of new plantings-offsets some of CRP's environmental benefits. Wu does not account for the...

We examine the persistence of cropland retirements induced by the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), the largest U.S. conservation program. We analyze micro data on observed land-use choices following CRP contract expiration over 1995–1997 and predict that 42% of CRP acres would not have been...