This paper characterizes the optimal use of sanitary and phytosanitary standards to prevent the introduction of harmful pests and diseases through international trade. Because established pest and disease infestations grow and spread over time their introduction has intertemporal consequences....

Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG's) and Error Correction Models (ECM's) are employed to analyze questions of price discovery between spatially separated commodity markets and the transportation market linking them together. Results from our analysis suggest these markets are highly interconnected...

Scouting is the most widely used integrated pest management (IPM) technique. It has been argued that only independent crop consultants provide unbiased scouting information. In contrast, chemical dealers inflate scouting reports and/or reduce economic thresholds in order to increase pesticide...

Each year U.S. farmers receive more subsidies than needy families receive through welfare assistance or post-secondary students receive through student aid grants. Yet, who benefits from agricultural subsidies is an open question. Economic theory predicts the entire subsidy incidence should be...

Trade, the exchange of goods and services across countries, is often viewed as an engine of economic growth. Benefits of liberalized trade include access to a larger variety of goods and services to consumers, easier access to foreign technologies, access to larger markets for producers, and...

We investigate nutrient trading for point and non-point sources for the Bay Restoration Fund in Maryland. We demonstrate how to use the proceeds from the tax revenue to mimic trading high-cost upgrades of sewage treatment plants for low-cost winter cover crops. Under an optimistic assumption...

This paper studies the interactions between harvesters that depend on the renewable resource as a vital factor of production (i.e., fisheries) and industries that can have important impacts on the renewable resource but whose production does not depend on it (i.e., off-shore oil extraction) in...

This paper reports results from a field experiment in Uganda. The proportion of children five years and younger who slept under a mosquito net was 20 percent higher when nets were distributed for free compared to when an equivalent cash transfer could be used to purchase nets. This effect is...