Carol Adaire Jones

Longitudinal Patterns of Compliance with Occupational Safety and Health Administration Health and Safety Regulations in the Manufacturing Sector

We examine the impact of Occupational Safety and Health Administration enforcement on compliance with agency regulations in the manufacturing sector, with a unique plant-level data set on inspections and compliance during 1972-83, the first 12 years of the agency. The analysis suggests that, for an individual plant, the effect of OSHA inspections during this period was to reduce the level of citations on average by 3.1-3.5, or approximately half of the first inspection average of 6.3 citations. The total effect on expected citations of OSHA inspections can be decomposed into two parts: evaluated at the mean of the sample predictions, half of the total reduction in citations occurred due to previous violators coming into compliance and half was due to a reduction in citations among plants that continued to violate the standards.

The Effect of Modeling Substitute Activities on Recreational Benefit Estimates

We use a nested-logit model of recreational fishing to examine how varying the range of fishing activities included in the choice set affects welfare measures. The basic analytical results are quite intuitive: welfare calculations with a site-choice travel cost model that omits relevant substitute activities will tend to understate gains and to overstate losses for a fixed sample and a fixed set of model parameters. The magnitude of bias in any particular case will be directly related to the degree of substitution between the omitted activities and the activities included in the model. In our empirical application, we examine changes in the quality of trout and salmon fishing on the Great Lakes and on anadromous runs. For most of the scenarios examined, we find that models that only include Great Lakes and anadromous fishing activities, to the exclusion of inland fishing activities, yield welfare results that are relatively similar to those of models that include the full range of activities, provided care is taken to extrapolate the results to a common population. The results are due to the relatively low predicted rates of substitution between inland and Great Lakes fishing activities. We derive implications for benefits transfer procedures.

Agriculture's Supply and Demand for Energy and Energy Products

Rising energy prices and changing energy and environmental policies have transformed the relationship between the energy and agriculture sectors. Traditionally, the relationship has been one-way, with agriculture using energy products as an input in production; during the past decade, however, the energy sector’s use of agricultural products as renewable-fuel feedstocks has increased substantially. This report examines both sector and farm-level responses to changing market and policy drivers such as the increased production of biofuel crops and other sources of renewable energy, together with changes in production practices to economize on energy-based inputs like fertilizer. We provide insight into how farmers have adapted to the changes and update and provide new data on the evolving linkages between the energy and agricultural sectors.

Bio-electricity and land use in the Future Agricultural Resources Model (FARM)

Bio-electricity is an important technology for Energy Modeling Forum (EMF-27) mitigation scenarios, especially with the possibility of negative carbon dioxide emissions when combined with carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS). With a strong economic foundation, and broad coverage of economic activity, computable general equilibrium models have proven useful for analysis of alternative climate change policies. However, embedding energy technologies in a general equilibrium model is a challenge, especially for a negative emissions technology with joint products of electricity and carbon dioxide storage. We provide a careful implementation of bio-electricity with CCS in a general equilibrium context, and apply it to selected EMF-27 mitigation scenarios through 2100. Representing bio-electricity and its land requirements requires consideration of competing land uses, including crops, pasture, and forests. Land requirements for bio-electricity start at 200 kilohectares per terawatt-hour declining to approximately 70 kilohectares per terwatt-hour by year 2100 in scenarios with high bioenergy potential.

Farm Household Well-Being: Comparing Consumption- and Income-Based Measures

This paper reports estimates of consumption-based measures of well-being for farm households based on new, specially-designed survey questions in USDA’s annual, nationally representative survey of farms, the Agricultural Resource Management Survey. With this new data, we show how patterns of consumption-smoothing relative to income levels differ between farm households versus all U.S. households, and between households of operators of large farms vs. “residential-lifestyle” farms, with limited exposure to farm income variability. We then show that the consumption measure provides a different perspective than income and wealth on the well-being of farm households relative to all U.S. households.

Modeling Demand for Recreational Trips of Differing Lengths: A Competing Risks Duration Model with Censoring and Time-varying Covariates

In this paper we characterize seasonal recreational participation with a model of between-trip durations, a variation on seasonal participation models that provides certain advantages relative to modeling total trip counts directly. Employing a competing risk framework, we are able to model anglers? demands for trips of different lengths. The duration framework also allows us to model the effect on total trips of intra-seasonal variations in explanatory variables such as fish catch rates. Further we develop the model for a context where the available data are limited to detailed information on the most recent trip, supplemented by the return date of the survey. The proposed resolution to the challenges of left- and right-censored duration data employs the ?memoryless? exponential distribution for the duration model, which implies a Poisson count model. With another dataset, we provide an external validation test of the predicted number of angler trips from the model.