Projects Funded for -
Water Quality in California: The Role of Economic, Social, and Political Factors
Y. Hossein Farzin
The Supply of Mexican Labor to U. S. and California Farms
J. Edward Taylor
The Implications of Marketing-Order Quality Regulations in a Free-Market Environment
Hoy Carman, Richard Sexton, and Tina L. Saitone
The Effect of 9/11 on the Agricultural Labor Market
Jeffrey Perloff
Public Research for California Specialty Crops
Julian Alston and Philip Pardey
Optimal Promotion and Production Research Expenditures for Commodity Groups in the Presence of Buyer Market Power
Rachael Goodhue
Index Insurance and Agricultural Risk: A Dynamic Analysis
Steve Boucher
Improving Veterinary Health Care Delivery for Underserved Areas: A Pilot Project for Found Valley California
James Chalfant
Immigration Reform: Implications for California Agriculture
Bert Mason and Philip Martin
Grape Growers and the Economics of the Powdery Mildew Index
Travis J. Lybbert
Gasoline Prices. Grocery Expenditures and Consumption: Revisiting the Income Effect
Sofia Villas-Boas
From Orange Juice to Cattle: Using Intertemporal Price Spreads to Measure the Influence of Hedge Funds in Futures Markets
Colin Carter
Economics of Environmental Services in California Agriculture
Antoine Champetier and James Wilen
Economic Wealth and the Extensive Margin
Jeffrey T. LaFrance
California Agriculture in a Changing Energy Economy
David Roland-Holst
An Economic and Political Investigation of Groundwater Management
Gordon Rausser and Susan Stratton
Abstract
This research project assesses the political implications of intra-aquifer heterogeneity in the benefits and costs of optimal groundwater management. We use simulation modeling to predict groundwater extraction regimes under two alternative local decision-making structures and compare these structures to optimal management. Local collective action performs poorly when the intra-aquiferdisparity in the potential gains is large. As a result, local collective action is unlikely to be successful in capturing the largest welfare gains. Individual subregions within a groundwater basin almost always benefit most from political structures whose outcomes diverge from optimal management. The analysis in this paper suggests that there may be regions where large potential gains from optimal management are available, but cannot be realized by the two alternative local political institutions. Thus, there may be a role for State intervention in the local political processes by which local water management decisions are made.
Publications
"Property Rights and Water Transfers: Bargaining Among Multiple Stakeholders" (with Susan Stratton Sayre and Leo K. Simon). Strategic Behavior and the Environment 1(1): 1-29, 2010.
"Local Negotiation with Heterogeneous Groundwater Users" (with Susan Stratton Sayre and Leo K. Simon). Forthcoming in Strategic Behavior and the Environment.
Agricultural Technology Disadoption: California Dairy Producers and Recombinant Bovine Somatropin
Leslie (Bees) Butler
Abstract
In this paper, we estimated the effects of two shocks to rbST use in the dairy industry using discrete-time duration analysis, a method that has been used frequently by other social scientists but less so by economists. The main advantage to using discrete-time duration analysis to model technology choice is that most technology choice decisions are inherently discrete and therefore more accurately modeled as a repeated series of binary decisions.
In our empirical application, we examined the effects of two shocks on the use of rbST by California dairy farmers. We show that the disadoption rate in 2004 was not statistically different from the disadoption rate in earlier years. This suggests that dairy producers interpreted the rationing imposed by the shortage as an atypical event that did not increase their estimation of the costs and risks associated with rbST use enough to warrant disadoption.
The ban in 2007, however, had a large and positive effect on the disadoption of rbST. The disadoption rate was significantly higher in 2008 than in any other year in whichthe disadoption of rbST was possible. While this result is not surprising, it does indicate that for many producers, the benefits from using rbST were not large enough to encourage producers to seek other buyers for their milk and/or pay the surcharge that processors charge to store and handle rbST-milk separately.
Agricultural Mechanization: Lessons From the Past and Prospects for the Future
Alan Olmstead
Advances in Recreation Demand Modeling with an Application to Southern California Wilderness Areas
Ken Baerenklau, Kurt Schwabe, and W. Bowman Cutter
Abstract
The broad objective of this work is to improve upon zonal approaches to recreation demand modeling. A standard zonal model ignores important aspects of spatial heterogeneity that are inherent in recreation demand contexts. The standard approach aggregates across groups of heterogeneous agents, and models them as homogenous points of origin for demand estimation. The standard approach also ignores that these heterogeneous agents deliberately choose their points of origin, which introduces a source of bias into the estimation. This work has produced a peer-reviewed article that addresses these shortcomings. This article, “A Latent Class Approach to Modeling Endogenous Spatial Sorting in Zonal Recreation Demand Models” (Land Economics86(4):800-816), demonstrates how a latent class count data model can control for unobserved heterogeneity that may lead to spatial sorting of recreationists. Results show that welfare estimates from this model for a southern California wilderness site are substantially smaller than for the standard approach.