School environment and policies affect children's healthy eating choices both at and away from school. We estimate their effect on fruit and vegetable intakes and control for the endogenous decision to participate in the National School Lunch Program. School meal participants consume more total...

In a recent working paper, Christopher Knittel and Aaron Smith present an attack on a peer-reviewed paper "The Impact of Ethanol Production on US and Regional Gasoline Markets Relating Ethanol Production to Gasoline Prices" written by myself and Xiaodong Du, and published in 2009 in Energy...

Press reports indicate that the Environmental Protection Agency may significantly reduce ethanol mandates to levels that can easily be met. To gain insight into what this decision implies about the price of corn we use a new model of the corn and RIN markets to project corn and ethanol prices...

The American Petroleum Institute (API) commissioned NERA Economic Consulting to study "the economics and compliance issues related to the implementation of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2)." NERA's October 2012 report finds that ethanol and biodiesel blend walls create insurmountable barriers...

We compute the fertilizer use in corn, cotton, soybeans, and rapeseed in the period from 1990 to 2010 for a set of selected countries. In each case, we present the consumption of nitrogen, phosphate, and potash by crop and by year, reporting both the fertilizer application rates (in kilograms...

The proposed decision by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reduce biofuel mandates that can be met by ethanol to about 13 billion gallons is predicated in part on a finding that consumption of ethanol is largely limited to the amount that can be consumed in E10, a blended fuel...

When the threat of entry by followers includes cooperative firms, the maximum fixed cost that a profit maximizing leader can endure is endogenous. The aggressive strategy required for entry deterrence curtails the leader's expected profit and can discourage its initial entry. In such...

This paper models producers' interdependent incentives to participate in a voluntary livestock disease control program. Under strategic complementarity among participation decisions, after a slow start momentum can build such that market premium for participation and participation rate increase...

In this paper, we discuss the importance of developing integrated assessment models to support the design and implementation of policies to address water quality problems associated with agricultural pollution. We describe a new modeling system, LUMINATE, which links land use decisions made at...

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed in November to reduce 2014 biofuel mandates. One concern expressed by EPA is that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to consume the 2014 target levels of ethanol in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) because of infrastructure issues....