Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics

Permanent URI for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/10217/100304

These digital collections consist of theses, dissertations, and faculty publications from the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. Also included is a collection of Extension and Outreach publications provided by the department. Due to departmental name changes, materials from the following historical department are also included here: Agricultural Economics.

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Open Access
Human behavior in the context of water scarcity
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Maas, Alexander, author; Goemans, Christopher, advisor; Manning, Dale, advisor; Kroll, Stephan, committee member; Arabi, Mazdak, committee member
This dissertation in comprised of three chapters which use microeconomic principles and empirics to examine human behavior in the face of water scarcity. Chapter one uses an experiment to investigate the effect of threshold uncertainty on common pool resource (CPR) consumption decisions. Chapter two uses latent class analysis to endogenously identify unique household classes with respect to their water use decisions under various price and weather scenarios. Chapter three directly compares the residential water consumption decisions of households motivated primarily by social and environmental outcomes with households primarily motivated by cost and convenience. The overall goal of my work is to elucidate the behavior and motivation that leads to particular consumption decisions in the presence of water scarcity. Chapter one explicitly models a CPR in which uncertainty around a tipping point—stock level below which the resource is destroyed—can engender two distinct Nash Equilibria (NE), both of which lead to a Tragedy of the Commons. We theoretically and empirically test how differing levels of uncertainty around the location of this tipping point affects individual and group consumption choices. Our results suggest that the presence of uncertainty increases the likelihood that individuals choose the NE consistent with resource destruction (even though it is an inferior NE) and to ignore potential impacts on resource stocks. However, conditional on choosing the superior NE, increased uncertainty does not affect consumption rates in the experiment. In addition, we introduce tax and fine policies and find that they reduce overall consumption rates and the probability that individuals choose to destroy the resource. Chapter 2 and 3, do not explicitly model scarcity, but they examine household water consumption in the arid southwest where water scarcity is a pervasive concern. Both chapters two and three use data from Fort Collins Utilities to investigate household heterogeneity and water consumption decisions. Chapter 2 uses a finite mixture model to endogenously identify distinct water use patterns. Estimated price elasticities are consistent with previous literature and range from -0.1 in the spring for the unresponsive class to -0.8 in the summer for the responsive class. We find significant evidence that households classes exist and can generally be broken into high responsive and low responsive classes. Our results also suggest that changes in precipitation will have little effect on demand, but a 2 degree temperature increase will increase residential water demand throughout the city by approximately 5%. Lastly, chapter two investigates the burden of price increases and weather shocks across household class and income level. We find that the vast majority of water reductions due to price increases come from middle and high income homes. Chapter three is similar to chapter two in motivation, but distinct in methodology. Chapter 3 poses and attempts to answer a simple question: do households primarily motivated by environmental and social (E&S) consideration consume water differently than households motivated primarily by cost and convenience (C&C)? Results strongly indicate that E&S consumers use less water than (C&C) consumers. Results also suggest that E&S motivated households consume significantly more water as temperatures rise. However, there is no statistical difference between E&S and C&C consumers in their responses to changing price and precipitation.
Open Access
Modeling the impact of transaction costs and alternative supply sources on water market activity in the western U.S.
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Bauman, Allison, author; Goemans, Christopher, advisor; Thilmany, Dawn, advisor; Pritchett, James, committee member; Arabi, Mazdak, committee member; Warziniack, Travis, committee member
To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document.
Open Access
Soil degradation in China: implications for agricultural sustainability, food security and the environment
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Hou, Lingling, author; Hoag, Dana L. K., advisor; Loomis, John B., committee member; Davies, Stephen P., committee member; Arabi, Mazdak, committee member
This dissertation consists of one introduction chapter and three essays, which describe and discuss methods to address three separate but related issues in soil management in China. In my introductory Chapter, I discuss the background for the soil degradation in China and how soil degradation threatens food security, the environment and agricultural sustainability. In the first essay in Chapter 2, I develop a dynamic optimization model for soil management and provide implications for the influence of externalities on intertemporal management of soil capital. This chapter contributes to the literature by providing a more comprehensive dynamic optimization model from a social planner's standpoint, who is concerned about agricultural sustainability, environmental quality and food security. A comparison by numerical methods between a public model and a private model implies that optimal soil management path is different for farmers than for social planners when externalities are considered. This implies that it is important to take externalities into account when managing natural capital such as soil. Food security, as a positive externality, and environmental pollution, as a negative externality, are complementing each other. Factors affecting farm profits and externalities also affect the optimal path. In Chapter 3, I propose environment-adjusted profit as a more appropriate tool to measure the costs imposed by environmental regulations than abatement costs from a shadow pricing model. Environment-adjusted profit updates abatement costs by taking farmers' mitigation behavior into account. Both abatement costs and environment-adjusted profit are estimated for over 1,700cropping systems in the Loess Plateau of China. Furthermore, a regression was used to determine the cropping systems that are most profitable as environmental regulations were imposed. Results show that conservation techniques and mono-crop corn and rotations such as corn-soybean-corn and alfalfa 3 years-corn-millet contribute more to farm profit if environmental regulations were imposed. The conclusions from this chapter can provide farmers and policy-makers alternative choices to balance both economic and environmental goals, rather than planting all land to trees through the Grain for Green program, which was the choice for many in the Loess Plateau. In Chapter 4, I update the sustainable value approach by a DEA benchmark and apply it to the cropping systems in the Loess Plateau of China to investigate sustainable value and efficiency as measures of sustainability. The cropping systems that contribute the most to sustainability from the perspective of using all types of capital efficiently are identified by a regression model. Sustainable value and efficiency matrices are created to compare the sustainability between any pair of rotations and conservation techniques. Rotations such as CSC, A3CM and FA5MC are most sustainable. Conservation techniques such as terracing, mulching and furrow-ridging are more sustainable. This chapter contributes the literature in soil science by adding economic perspective in analyzing agronomic techniques.
Open Access
Three essays on institutional design for voluntary water conservation
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Sharp, Misti, author; Hoag, Dana, advisor; Manning, Dale, committee member; Suter, Jordan, committee member; Arabi, Mazdak, committee member
This dissertation is a compilation of three essays on institutional issues inherent in water conservation decision making by agricultural producers. Chapter 1 includes summaries of the three papers I intend to defend and introduces some ideas and concepts visited throughout the dissertation. Chapter 2 presents the results of a multidisciplinary study on managing selenium pollution in the Lower Arkansas River Basin in Southeastern Colorado titled, "Institutional Constraints on Cost-Effective Water Management: Selenium Contamination in Colorado's Lower Arkansas River Valley." The study presents the cost-effectiveness of various management practices to mitigate selenium pollution flows simulated over twenty years using regional scale groundwater and reactive solute transport models. Social institutions, such as rules on water conservation, serve to influence decision making and alter the economic feasibility of conservation efforts. The third chapter, "Uncertainty and Technology Adoption: Lessons from the Arkansas River Valley," extends the property rights institutional concerns introduced in chapter 2 and looks specifically to how use-based property rights influence decision making for conservation irrigation technology. When an irreversible investment is made under uncertainty, there is often a delay in investment that would not be seen under the traditional Marshallian framework for investment. This study advances the literature by exploring how property rights further exacerbate this option value hurdle which serves to further delay investment under uncertain water supplies. An empirical section explores how property rights are being applied in the Arkansas River Basin and discusses the implications for future conservation efforts. Finally, the last chapter, "An Experimental Approach to Resolving Uncertainty in Water Quality Trading Markets," uses experimental economics to explore the impacts of resolving uncertainty in water quality trading market design. This paper looks at whether non-point sources would take an opportunity to resolve environmental uncertainty if there is a water quality trading market in place. Additionally, it explores the interactions between a pollution market and voluntary abatement with and without a voluntary-threat regulation.
Open Access
Three essays on the economics of water resources and climate change
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Blumberg, Joey, author; Goemans, Chris, advisor; Manning, Dale, committee member; Burkhardt, Jesse, committee member; Arabi, Mazdak, committee member
This dissertation investigates three broad topics in the economics of water resources and climate change. In the first chapter, I explore how changes in perceptions about water availability affect the adoption of conservation practices. I present a theoretical framework to examine how producer perceptions influence investment in irrigation efficiency, and a period of extreme drought and institutional change in Colorado is leveraged as a natural experiment to evaluate theoretical hypotheses empirically. The second chapter assesses the sensitivity of climate change impact estimates to the climate economy functional form in agriculture. I accomplish this through the development of a long-run dataset of county-level weather and climate metrics, including hourly temperature measurements across all counties in the conterminous US, and demonstrate the consequences of multiple modelling approaches that are common in the literature. I also create a composite vulnerability index that integrates the magnitude and consistency of impacts across all defensible models to generate a comprehensive measure of climate risk to a county's agricultural sector. In the final chapter, I compare the economic efficiency of different water allocation mechanisms. A combination of optimization models and water supply simulations are employed to compare prior appropriation with and without water markets, and alternative, share-based mechanisms. I illustrate how the physical and institutional components of a river basin, such return flows, user seniority, heterogeneous value functions, and user locations (i.e., upstream or downstream), impact allocative performance.

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Browsing Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics by Author "Arabi, Mazdak, committee member"