Replaced with revised version of paper 08/25/03.

High rates of commercial fertilizer and animal manure application on cropland have been identified as an important cause of ground and surface water degradation in many areas of the country. Suggested remedies are often based on the idea that fertilization levels are economically irrational for...

A severance tax can provide local jurisdictions with additional revenues to finance economic development, yet the imposition of a tax may create coal industry employment losses. This research analyzes this issue by examining the demand for Pennsylvania steam coal, providing estimates of the...

Construct validity is concerned with the consistency of empirical measures with theoretical relationships. This paper reviews and extends the theoretical relationship between averting costs and willingness to pay. Measures of these two theoretical constructs with empirical averting costs savings...

The Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are promoting point/nonpoint trading as a way of reducing the costs of meeting water quality goals while giving nonpoint sources a larger role in meeting those goals. Farms can create offsets or credits in a...

There is much interest among economists and policy makers in the use of reverse auctions to purchase habitat conservation on private lands as a mechanism for minimizing public expenditures to achieve desired conservation outcomes. Examples are the Conservation Reserve Program (US) and...

A methodology for evaluating public wetlands conservation investments that considers climate change is developed and applied to Virginia's Elizabeth River watershed. A revised cellular automaton (CA) model is applied to project future land use change. Discrete stochastic sequential programming...

In this study we use data envelopment analysis (DEA), and an extension of DEA called value efficiency analysis (VEA), to explore the production of quality of life within counties in the mid-Atlantic region and the extent to which production frontiers and efficiency differ between rural and urban...

Owing to the fundamental importance of food to human welfare and of climate to crop and livestock production, agriculture has been a focus of research on the impacts of climate change and variability. This research has been largely concerned with implications for the supply and cost of food and...