A major task of economics and policy economics is to explain the pattern of government behavior in its interventions in the economy. This paper introduces the use of the Decision Tree methodology to help capture policy making behavior and provide extended insights into the decision making...

Recent lumber price volatility has been attributed to Spotted Owl Litigation and U.S.-Canada trade disputes. We use intervention analysis to explain daily lumber futures price volatility based on these events and other factors. The way information enters the market is shown to affect the speed...

A dynamic model is developed that jointly optimizes over groundwater quality and quantity for extractive municipal and non-extractive agricultural users. The model is applied to an aquifer in southern Ontario to analyze several policy scenarios, demonstrating that interactions between...

The populist view of economic development and the environment is that advances in one will necessarily result in a decline in the other. Evidence in the Australian context is that the dual goals can be achieved simultaneously. As economic development progresses, the increasing levels of income...

This paper reports on a case study to establish dollar values for loss of biodiversity in the New Zealand coastal marine environment. The study uses the European Shore Crab (Carcinas maenas) as the example alien invasive species and the Pauatahanui Inlet, Wellington, New Zealand, as the...

In many areas of developing countries, economic and institutional factors often combine to give farmers incentives to clear forests and repeatedly plant food crops without sufficiently replenishing the soils. These activities lead to large-scale land degradation and contribute to global warming...

Social Appraisal of Agricultural Projects

This study estimates the carbon footprint of a Henderson County, Kentucky grain farmer under different production strategies; traditional farming and precision agriculture technologies. Four constrained optimization, whole farm analysis models were formulated under no-till conditions. One of the...

Arkansas is the top domestic rice producer, representing nearly half of total U.S. rice production. Sediment is one of the major pollutants in rice producing areas of Arkansas. In order to mitigate this problem no-tillage management is often recommended. No-tillage is not well understood by...