Policy makers should consider price volatility effects when determining appropriate spending levels for alternative fuel programs.

Recent failures of renewable energy plants have raised concerns regarding government's role in providing credit subsidies and have harmed the long-run development of renewable energy. The major reason for these failures lies in government loan appraisers not having a model that addresses these...

The objective of this paper is to analyze the relationship of the carbon Kuznets curve. We discuss two potential flaws in past carbon Kuznets curve studies: one, the potential misspecification of energy consumption as a control variable; and, two, the use of vector error correction models as an...

The US Environmental Protection Agency announced a waiver allowing an increase in the Fuel-Ethanol blend limit (the “blend wall” ) from 10% (E10) to 15% (E15) on October,2010.Justifications for the waiver are reduced vehicle fuel prices and less consumption of petroleum gasoline, leading to...

Since the beginning of this century, China’s annual GDP growth is over 9%. This growth is fueled by large increases in energy consumption, led by a coal-dominated energy structure, and associated with higher sulfur dioxide emissions and industry dust. In 2008, China accounted for over 17% of...

This study examines the interaction between insurance, credit and liquidity constraints using a stochastic dynamic model. A risk averse farmer whose objective is to manage both production and market risk is assumed to maximize the expected utility of life-time consumption by using both area...

This paper presents a dynamic crop rotation model that shows how crop yield and price volatility could impact crop mix and acreage response under crop rotation considerations. Specifically, a discrete Markov decision model is utilized to optimize producers’ crop rotation decision within a...

The objective of this study is to compare the effects of climate change on crop yields across different regions. A Principal Component Regression (PCR) model is developed to estimate the historical relationships between weather and crop yields for corn, soybeans, cotton, and peanuts for several...