Matching Items (3)
Filtering by

Clear all filters

157254-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are transactions between landholders and the beneficiaries of the services their land provides. PES schemes are growing worldwide with annual transactions over ten billion dollars (Salzman et al., 2018). Much can be learned from looking at oldest and best funded PES schemes on working agricultural

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are transactions between landholders and the beneficiaries of the services their land provides. PES schemes are growing worldwide with annual transactions over ten billion dollars (Salzman et al., 2018). Much can be learned from looking at oldest and best funded PES schemes on working agricultural land. Initiated in 1985, the USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is the oldest private conservation PES program in the United States. CRP incentivizes farmers to put their land into conservation through an annual payment. In Iowa, CRP has been a source of extra income and a way for farmers to buffer the fluctuating costs of cash crops, such as corn and soy. The dominance of agriculture in Iowa poses many challenges for water quality. A potential solution to the problem, implemented through CRP, is the use of conservation practices to mitigate the negative effects of agricultural run-off.

This dissertation considers three aspects of the problem:

1. the relationship between changes in land cover due to CRP enrollment and changes in water quality, controlling for a range of factors known to have an effect on the filtering role of different land covers;

2. the inter-annual variability in water quality measures and enrollment in different CRP conservation practices to examine the cost-effectiveness of specific conservation practices in mitigating lake sedimentation and eutrophication;

3. discrete choice models to identify what characteristics drive the enrollment by farmers into specific conservation practices.

Results indicate that land cover and CRP have different impacts on different indicators of lake water quality. In addition, conservation practices that were cost-effective for one water quality variable tended to be cost-effective for the other water quality variables. Farmers are making decisions to enroll in CRP based on the opportunity cost of the land. Therefore, it is necessary to alter financial incentives to promote productive land being putting into CRP through continuous sign-up. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) needs a more effective way to calculate the payment level for practices in order to be competitive with the predicted value of major crops.
ContributorsCamhi, Ashley L (Author) / Perrings, Charles (Thesis advisor) / Abbott, Joshua K (Thesis advisor) / Englin, Jeffrey (Committee member) / Sala, Osvaldo (Committee member) / Iovanna, Rich (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
155863-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Three demand systems were estimated to examine demand sensitivity and welfare changes for each commodity under study. In the first essay, a Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System (QUAIDS) was used to examine the effect of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear disaster on the demand for imported pelagic fish in the domestic

Three demand systems were estimated to examine demand sensitivity and welfare changes for each commodity under study. In the first essay, a Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System (QUAIDS) was used to examine the effect of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear disaster on the demand for imported pelagic fish in the domestic Japanese market. The effect of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear disaster was measured using changes in demand after the disaster as well as measures of changes in social welfare changes caused by the disaster. A significant effect of the disaster on demand sensitivity measures was found, but no significant changes in welfare. In the second essay, a differential demand system examined the effect of exchange rate fluctuations on the demand for fresh tomatoes in the U.S. Market. It was found that the U.S. Dollar-Mexican Peso exchange rate had a significant positive effect on the demand for Mexican fresh tomatoes. In the third essay, a Hurdle Negative Binomial demand system was estimated for recreational trips to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. This model was estimated using Bayesian methods to obtain parameter estimates that could not be obtained by maximum likelihood. The parameters were used to calculate recreational welfare measures for trips to seventy-two entry points.
ContributorsValdez Lafarga, Octavio (Author) / Englin, Jeffrey (Thesis advisor) / Schmitz, Troy (Committee member) / Abbott, Joshua (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
161907-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Women’s contributions to agriculture are an essential factor in achieving food security in developing countries. In rice production, women’s involvement is usually limited to their labor participation. Differences in gender roles within the household hinder women from accessing productive resources and services compared to their male counterparts, leading to a

Women’s contributions to agriculture are an essential factor in achieving food security in developing countries. In rice production, women’s involvement is usually limited to their labor participation. Differences in gender roles within the household hinder women from accessing productive resources and services compared to their male counterparts, leading to a gender gap in rice productivity. With the steady growth of rice productivity experienced in eastern India, it is essential to reduce the gender gap by providing women equal access to resources. However, there is little information on how the gender gap can be addressed between married couples in a patriarchal family structure like India. This dissertation analyzes the potential impact on rice productivity and input use when the spouse (wife) in the household has given access to resources (e.g., rice variety and credit). The first chapter analyzes the impact of a married couple’s decision-making strategy in choosing rice varieties on rice productivity and input use using an endogenous switching regression. The second chapter estimates the effect of access to financial services on technical efficiency using a stochastic production frontier framework. The last chapter evaluates how joint decision-making strategy influences the inverse relationship between farm size and rice productivity following a yield approach and quantile regression. The findings show that joint decision-making strategy choice leads to a higher rice yield and fertilizer usage while lower labor requirements. Regarding spouse access to financial resources, results show a significant difference in technological and managerial gaps. However, that households with access have a lower predicted rice yield than households without access. The last chapter shows that joint decision-making in the family still left the inverse relationship unchanged in examining the inverse relationship. The dissertation provides two significant implications. First, results provide evidence of gender-differentiated preferences for rice variety within the household that can affect rice productivity and input use. Second, the spouse’s access to credit does not necessarily lead to an increase in rice productivity. Thus, determining the primary purpose of why households avail financial services would be essential in analyzing its impact on productivity to avoid misleading results.
ContributorsMalabayabas, Maria Luz Lazaro (Author) / Mishra, Ashok K (Thesis advisor) / Englin, Jeffrey (Committee member) / Manfredo, Mark (Committee member) / Aggarwal, Rimjhim (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021