Agricultural & Resource Economics Theses and Dissertations

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End date: 2009

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    An Economic Study of 128 Dairy Farms on the Upper Eastern Shore of Maryland
    (1938) Smith, Carl B.; DeVault, S.H.; Hamilton, A.B.; Agricultural & Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
    This study analyzes the second year's survey or 128 dairy farms, representative of the dairy industry on the Upper Eastern Shore of Maryland. This area, which includes Cecil, Kent, Queen Anne's, Talbot, and Caroline counties, is a part of the Philadelphia Milk Shed.
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    The Attitudes of Volunteer Leaders in Cecil, Harford and Kent Counties, Maryland Toward Involvement of Handicapped in 4-H Programs
    (1982) Coleman, Bernardine Marie; Booth, Nan; Agricultural & Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
    The purpose of this exploratory study was to determine if volunteer 4-H leaders in Cecil, Harford, and Kent Counties in Maryland were receptive towards involvement of handicapped youth in 4-H programs and if training was needed prior to program implementation. Seventy-four volunteer leaders in the three counties surveyed returned completed mail questionnaires. An attitude rating scale was used to assess leaders attitudes toward involvement of handicapped youth in 4-H programs. Demographic and personal data were requested in Part II of the survey instrument. Frequency distribution and the chi-square test were used to analyze data. Level of significance was set at .05. The majority of leaders had positive feelings about the involvement of handicapped youth in 4-H programs but felt training was needed before involvement took place. Significant relationships were found between age and the attitudes concerning, l) involvement of handicapped youth as being a good experience for other 4-H members, 2) handicapped youth being able to participate adequately in 4-H programs, 3) 4-H being a help to mentally retarded youth and, 4) the belief that other groups were meeting the needs of handicapped youth. Significant relationships were also found between education and the attitude concerning, l) involvement of handicapped youth as being a good experience for handicapped youth, 2) feeling comfortable with emotionally handicapped, educable and trainable mentally retarded children and, 3) having adequate training to work with handicapped youth.
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    A Calculus of Efficiency for Public Goods: The Case of Public Outdoor Recreation
    (1972) Ulfat, Abderrahman; Tuthill, Dean F.; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
    The characteristics of public outdoor recreation as a public good are ascertained. A cost-benefit analysis is applied which ensures efficiency, while allowing for the pecuniary and technological externalities that exist in the development of outdoor recreation resorts. A total willingness to pay technique is utilized to approximate the consumer's valuation of benefits from recreation. Essential to the technique is the derivation of total willingness to pay curve which parallels the demand curve for private goods. Total willingness to pay is used instead of consumer's surplus, because the latter is associated with a market price which is not determined for public outdoor recreation. Since the total willingness to pay curve is a function of income distribution, once derived, the curve can be adjusted to rid the analysis of income distribution bias. The adjustment helps achieve equity in the allocation of recreational resorts. Fort Frederick State Park provided a case of application for the technique. A sample survey conducted in the Fort was the basis for the derivation of a total willingness to pay curve. The curve shows the relation between expenditures incurred, in time and money, to visits at Fort Frederick. The rates of growth for expenditures, income and population were the basis for the simulation of the total willingness to pay up to the year 2000. Integration of the areas under the simulated demand curves was an approximation of the future willingness to pay or benefits derived from recreational experience at the Fort. After dividing the discounted value of benefits by the estimated costs of developing the Fort, a benefit-cost ratio was obtained, which was a quantitative endorsement in favor of the development of Fort Frederick.
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    Determinants of Childhood Morbidity and the Role of Malnutrition: Evidence from Indonesia
    (2009) Wilson, Shannon Leigh; Cropper, Maureen L; Alberini, Anna; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Studies that have attempted to examine the impact of early childhood malnutrition on acute illness have failed to adequately establish the causal link from malnutrition to acute illness. The empirical challenge arises because household behavioral decisions that influence investment in a child's nutrition and growth are very likely correlated with other household decisions that affect a child's incidence of illness. These include decisions to invest in hygiene and sanitation or a mother's knowledge and use of appropriate feeding practices. There may also be unobserved risk factors, such as genetic endowments, which introduce correlation between one of the regressors - nutritional status - and the error term in a disease production equation. In this dissertation, I test two basic hypotheses: (1) chronic undernutrition in early childhood, as measured by stunting in children under five, increases the probability of contemporaneous acute illness; and (2) there is a significant effect of early childhood malnutrition on the probability of developing acute illness later in childhood. I estimate a model that predicts the incidence of febrile, diarrheal and respiratory disease, diseases which combined account for the greatest total burden of morbidity and mortality in children in developing countries. I focus my research on contemporaneous and longer-term acute illness outcomes in children under five for three reasons. First, substantial research has shown that children are at greatest risk of malnutrition in the early years of life, particularly before age two (Victora et al. 2008; Ruel et al 2008). In this period, children are no longer exclusively breastfeed and they have high nutritional requirements because they are growing quickly. Second, the burden of infectious disease is disproportionately borne by children under five due to their relatively immature immune systems and their dependence on caregivers to use appropriate feeding and hygiene practices to avoid infection (Martorell 1999; Martorell and Habicht 1986). Third, since most of the literature on the long-term consequences for human capital formation focuses on conditions in early childhood, by placing this research question in the same context, it can be more clearly seen as contributing to the broader literature on human capital formation. I employ instrumental variables to allow identification of the impact of early childhood malnutrition on acute illness. I use a panel dataset from three waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) to address the measurement challenges that arise due to the unobservable household factors that influence both the likelihood of early childhood malnutrition and acute illness, and the synergistic nature of malnutrition and infection. My results show a strong and statistically significant contemporaneous effect of malnutrition on the likelihood of acute illness. I find that children under five who are stunted are 16 percent more likely than children who are not stunted to report symptoms of acute illness. I find that the impact of malnutrition on the likelihood of acute illness remains positive and significant four years into the future. Children who were stunted in 1993 are still 5 percent more likely than non-stunted children to experience acute illness in 1997. While I find this impact of early childhood stunting on future illness outcomes dissipates seven years later, I present suggestive evidence that this may reflect the fact that many of the children in my sample who were stunted in 1993 are in fact no longer stunted by 2000. Overall, these results suggest that efforts at reducing early childhood malnutrition can lead not only to immediate health benefits in terms of lower rates of infectious disease, but also lead to better health outcomes in the future. Many international organizations and bilateral donors are prioritizing improvements in early childhood nutrition with the goal of improving long-term human capital outcomes (World Bank 2002; USAID 2008). The most important implication of my results is that improvements in early childhood nutrition and reducing the burden of disease are complementary objectives; improved early childhood nutrition will facilitate meeting the Millennium Development Goal of reducing the burden of disease. Further, to the extent improvements in pre-school nutritional status reduce either the incidence of acute illness, the severity of acute illness episodes, or both, such improvements may have indirect benefits. These include reducing school absenteeism which likely will enhance the acquisition of knowledge at school and lead to higher school completion rates among children in developing countries
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    Internalizing Production Externalities: A Structural Estimation of Real Options in the Upstream Oil and Gas Industry
    (2009) Muehlenbachs, Lucija; Nerlove, Marc; Rust, John; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    There are hundreds of thousands of crude oil and natural gas wells across North America that are currently not producing oil or gas. Many of these wells have not been permanently decommissioned to meet environmental standards for permanent closure, but are in an inactive state that enables them to be more easily reactivated. Some of these wells have been in this inactive state for more than sixty years which begs the question of whether they will ever contribute to our energy supply, or whether they are being left inactive because the environmental remediation costs are prohibitively high. I estimate a structural model of optimal well operations over time and under uncertainty to determine what conditions or policies might push any of the inactive wells out of the hysteresis in which they reside. The model is further used to forecast production from existing wells and recoverable reserves from existing pools. The estimation uses data on production decisions from 84 thousand conventional oil and gas wells and estimates of the remaining reserves of 47 thousand pools. As the producer's decision depends on their subjective belief for how prices and recoverable reserves change over time, I also estimate the probability of changes in prices and recovery technology. I model increases and decreases in the estimated recoverable reserves to depend on price, and predict that natural gas reserves are more responsive to changes in price than conventional oil reserves. Under high prices there is potential for large increases in gas reserves, however this is not the case for oil reserves when the oil price is high. And likewise, under low prices, gas reserves decrease more than oil reserves. The dynamic programming model predicts that with only a drastic, arguably implausible, increase in prices and recovery rates will there be a significant increase in the number of inactive wells that are reactivated. If ideal conditions are not enough to induce well reactivation then this implies that typically wells are left inactive not because of the option to reactivate, but rather because the cost of environmental cleanup is too high. Should there be externalities from idling the wells (such as continued contamination of groundwater) that are not accounted for in the decision, then this behavior may not be socially optimal. The model predicts that a Pigouvian tax on inactive wells would have the added benefit of inciting the reactivation of oil and gas wells, however in the case of oil, a tax would incite more wells to be decommissioned than reactivated.
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    PROTECTIONISM VERSUS RISK IN SCREENING FOR INVASIVE SPECIES
    (2009) Lawley, Chad Damon; Lichtenberg, Erik; Olson, Lars; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The perception that biosecurity import restrictions are used as disguised barriers to trade is widespread. Despite this perception, there has been little empirical analysis distinguishing genuine attempts to protect against introductions of foreign pests and diseases from attempts to distort trade. In this dissertation, I examine the extent to which enforcement of a biosecurity import standard - US agricultural border inspections for non-indigenous species (NIS) - is used as a disguised barrier to trade. I develop a theoretical model of border inspections that incorporates incentives to protect domestic agricultural producers from import competition as well as incentives to protect against NIS damage associated with agricultural imports. The theoretical model is used to specify an econometric model of border inspection that identifies a parameter representing the implied weight the inspection agency places on domestic producer welfare relative to consumer welfare. The structural model further identifies a parameter representing expected NIS damage as implied by the inspection agency's choice of inspection intensity. I estimate the parameters of the model using a dataset that documents the outcome of US agricultural border inspections. I find evidence suggesting that the inspection agency places greater weight on domestic producer welfare relative to consumer welfare, independent of expected NIS damage. Estimates of the implicit weight on domestic producer surplus range from 1 to 1.63. These results suggest that inspection protocols are implemented in a trade distorting manner to the benefit of domestic producers and at the expense of domestic consumers. I also find evidence that border inspections are influenced by terms of trade motives. The evidence that inspections are not implemented in a least trade distorting manner is independent of expected NIS damage. A second outcome of the econometric analysis is an estimate of expected NIS damage: I find that the inspection agency behaves as if expected NIS damage ranges from $0 to more than $0.25 per dollar of inspected imports.
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    HOUSEHOLD ENERGY USE, INDOOR AIR POLLUTION, AND HEALTH IMPACTS IN INIDA [i.e. India]: A WELFARE ANALYSIS
    (2009) Zhang, Yabei; Just, Richard; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation develops a unified analytical framework to understand the relationships among household energy use, indoor air pollution (IAP), and health impacts and enables policy-makers to analyze welfare effects of various interventions. This unified analytical framework includes four interlinked modules. Module 1 studies the determinants of IAP and constructs an IAP index to predict typical IAP exposure. Module 2 analyzes the impacts of IAP exposure on health, including both self-reported respiratory symptoms and physician-measured spirometry indicators. Module 3 uses a novel approach to model household behavior regarding energy technology choices based on utility maximizing behavior. Households are assumed to choose a cooking energy technology based on its attributes: cooking cost, convenience, and cleanliness. Household valuation of these attributes depends on household characteristics. Then based on the household utility function estimated from Module 3, Module 4 evaluates welfare change from various policy interventions. Empirical estimation relies primarily on two surveys recently conducted in India: a social science and environmental health survey entitled Health, Environment, and Economic Development and a multi-topic national representative sample survey called the India Human Development Survey. The two surveys were fielded between late 2004 and early 2005 and contain uniquely rich information on household energy use, indoor air pollution levels, and health indicators. This dissertation provides quantitative evidence that IAP has significant health impacts comparable to smoking. Based on analysis of IAP impacts on spirometry indicators, the evidence suggests that IAP has major impacts on restrictive lung disease rather than obstructive lung disease. These results explain why certain diseases are more highly associated with IAP exposure. Considering that traditional biomass will likely continue to be the most popular cooking fuel in rural areas of India in the near future, and that households can achieve considerable welfare gains from improvement in stoves and kitchen ventilation, the analysis suggests that the Indian government should consider reviving the improved stove program with a new advanced stove strategy coupled with conducting advocacy campaigns on how to improve kitchen ventilation. The analysis suggests small overall welfare effects of the pending phasing out of LPG subsidies.
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    Essays on Split Estate in Energy Development
    (2008) Fitzgerald, Timothy; McConnell, Kenneth; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Taking advantage of randomly-assigned federal mineral rights, the first essay establishes the discount that mineral developers place on oil and gas leases with divided ownership. This discount is interpreted as an expectation of reduced profits as a result of transaction costs incurred in obtaining surface access. Results of 53 bimonthy federal oil and gas lease auctions in Wyoming between February 1998 and October 2006 are examined. Bidders discount split estate by 11 to 14 percent on average, but by as much as 24 percent for more expensive leases. Impacts of multiple ownerships and additional leasing stipulations are also explored. The second essay examines how conflict between surface and subsurface owners affects production from coalbed methane wells in Wyoming. Using well-level production data from 1987-2006, wells on federal minerals with private surface are compared to those on federal minerals with federal surface. A kernel matching estimator is used to control for selection of well sites on the basis of observable information. Delays in entry on split estate are found, but are not associated with reduced production after entry. Some support is found for strategic incentives firms face regarding property rights. One way coalbed methane production differs from traditional oil and gas extraction is in the large quantities of produced water. Surface discharge has proven to be a low-cost alternative but raises the possibility of externalities. In the third essay a unique dataset linking coalbed methane wells in Wyoming to water disposal permit violations is used to explore differences in environmental performance across severed and unified minerals. A propensity score matching model is used to control for the endogeneity of tenure. The results suggest that split estate wells using surface discharge have a higher number of violations, but the severity of those violations is not significantly different from those on unified estates.
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    The Relationship between Child Labor and Microfinance: Evidence from Rural Bangladesh
    (2009) Khadka, Manbar Singh; Leonard, Kenneth L; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This paper analyzes the relationship between availability of microfinance and child labor in rural Bangladesh. Using household-level fixed effect in panel data, this paper shows that the stock of women's recent loans negatively impacts child labor. A 10 percent increase in the stock of recent borrowing by women reduces child labor supply by 2.58 percent. By contrast, the paper does not find any significant effect of male credit on child labor.
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    Three Empirical Studies in Market Design
    (2009) Stocking, Andrew James; Cramton, Peter; Lange, Andreas; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Market design is the development of mechanisms that improve market efficiency and build on an understanding of the interaction between human behavior and market rules. The first chapter considers the sale of a charitable membership where the charity poses the market design question of how to price these memberships to capture the maximum value from donors' altruism. Using an online natural field experiment with over 700,000 subjects, this chapter tests theory on price discounts and shows large differences in donation behavior between donors who have previously given money and/or volunteered. For example, framing the charity's membership price as a discount increases response rates and decreases conditional contributions from former volunteers, but not from past money donors. This chapter thereby demonstrates the importance of conditioning fundraising strategies on the specifics of past donation dimensions. The second chapter examines an auction used to solve the assignment and price determination problems where price depends on the propensity to own or farm the land, a non-market good. This chapter studies bidder behavior in a reverse auction where landowners compete to sell and retire the right to develop their farmland. A reduced form bidding model is used to estimate the role of bidder competition, winner's curse correction, and the underlying distribution of private values. The chapter concludes that the auction enrolled as much as 3,000 acres (12 percent) more than a take-it-or-leave-it offer (i.e., non-auction program) would have enrolled for the same budgetary cost. Finally, the third chapter considers the online advertising word auction. The pricing determination and assignment problem must occur for over 2,000 consumer searches each second. Theory is developed where asymmetric advertisers compete and an advertiser-optimal equilibrium bidding strategy is presented that is robust to this asymmetry. Within this rich strategy space, it is shown that advertiser subsidization can be revenue increasing for the search engine. Using a novel dataset of more than 4,500 keyword bids by three firms on four search engines, a simulation of the auction environment illustrates that bidder subsidization is indeed revenue positive and can be improved upon by imposing bid caps or fixed bids on the subsidized bidder.