Jeremy G. Weber

Do ICDPs Work?: An Empirical Evaluation of Forest-Based Microenterprises in the Brazilian Amazon

This paper evaluates public investments in forest-based microenterprises as part of an integrated conservation and development project (ICDP) in the Brazilian Amazon. We combine matching with regression to quantify the effects of program participation on household income, wealth, and livelihoods. We find that participation increased cash and total income and asset accumulation, suggesting that the microenterprises contributed to the development goals of the ICDP. There is no clear evidence, however, that the microenterprise program helped achieve the ICDP’s conservation goals of shifting household livelihoods away from agriculture and into sustainable forest use. (JEL O12, O13)

How much Do Decoupled Payments Affect Production? An Instrumental Variable Approach with Panel Data

Agricultural support payments that cause no or minimal production distortions are exempt from World Trade Organization restrictions. If and how much decoupled payments, such as direct payments in the U.S., affect agricultural production remains an open empirical question with implications for policy. We use multiple years of the Census of Agriculture to estimate the aggregate supply response to changes in direct payments. To identify an exogenous source of variation in payments we exploit a provision of the 2002 Farm Act that departed from previous policy by making oilseeds eligible for direct payments, thus increasing payments to areas that historically produced more oilseeds. Using a sample of ZIP codes that accounts for more than eighty percent of the national value of production of program crops, our instrumental variable estimates, in contrast to OLS estimates, suggest that changes in payments over the period 2002 to 2007 had little effect on aggregate production.

Shale Gas Development and Housing Values over a Decade: Evidence from the Barnett Shale

Extracting natural gas from shale formations can create local economic benefits such as public revenues but also disamenities such as truck traffic, both of which change over time. We study how shale gas development affected zip code level housing values in Texas’ Barnett Shale, which splits the Dallas-Fort Worth region in half and is the most extensively developed shale formation in the U.S. We find that housing in shale zip codes appreciated more than nonshale zip codes during peak development and less afterwards, with a net positive effect of five to six percentage points from 1997 to 2013. The greater appreciation in part reflects improved local public finances: the value of natural gas rights expanded the local tax base by

Capturing rents from natural resource abundance: Private royalties from U.S. onshore oil & gas production ☆

82,000 per student, increasing school revenues and expenditures. Within shale zip codes, however, an extra well per square kilometer was associated with a 1.6 percentage point decrease in appreciation over the study period.

What Can We Learn about Shale Gas Development from Land Values? Opportunities, Challenges, and Evidence from Texas and Pennsylvania

We study how much private mineral owners capture geologically-driven advantages in well productivity through a higher royalty rate. Using proprietary data from nearly 1.8 million leases, we estimate that the six major shale plays generated

Sustainable Rural Development and Wealth Creation Five Observations Based on Emerging Energy Opportunities

39 billion in private royalties in 2014. There is limited pass-through of resource abundance into royalty rates. A doubling of the ultimate recovery of the average well in a county increases the average royalty rate by 1–2 percentage points (a 6–11 percent increase). Thus, mineral owners benefit from resource abundance primarily through a quantity effect, not through negotiating better lease terms from extraction firms. The low pass-through likely reflects a combination of firms exercising market power in private leasing markets and uncertainty over the value of resource endowments.

Do Wealth Gains from Land Appreciation Cause Farmers to Expand Acreage or Buy Land

We study farm real estate values in the Barnett shale (Texas) and the northeastern part of the Marcellus shale (Pennsylvania and New York). We find that shale gas development caused appreciation in real estate values in both areas but the effect was much larger for the Marcellus, suggesting broader ownership of oil and gas rights by surface owners. In both regions, the greatest appreciation occurred when land was leased for drilling, not when drilling and production boomed. We find evidence that effects vary by farm type, which may reflect correlation between farm type and ownership of oil and gas rights.

Fair Trade-Organic Coffee Cooperatives, Migration, and Secondary Schooling in Southern Mexico

In this article, the authors argue that better data and research on rural wealth creation are greatly needed and present a conceptual framework to help guide such research. The authors then discuss five observations about rural wealth creation, based on examples drawn from the recent literature on emerging energy industries in rural America. The cases show that the types of data needed to draw conclusions about wealth effects of new development are highly contextual. The framework can help researchers think about the types of data needed to assess policy.

Rural Wealth Creation and Emerging Energy Industries: Lease and Royalty Payments to Farm Households and Businesses

Recent increases in farm real estate values in the United States have increased farm equity. By exploiting periods of high and low appreciation that caused various increases in wealth for farmers owning various shares of their farmland, we examine whether U.S. grain farmers expanded their acres harvested or acres owned in response to an increase in their land wealth. We find that land wealth had little effect on farm size. However, for similarly-sized farms, a larger ownership share (10 percentage points) led to an increase in the growth of land owned (2 percentage points). Because older farmers own more of the land that they farm, greater land appreciation slows the rate at which younger farmers acquire land relative to older farmers.

Who Does Dot Respond to the Agricultural Resource Management Survey and Does It Matter

Abstractn We explore three trends in rural southern Mexico (Fair Trade coffee, migration, and conditional cash transfers) that could explain the rapid rise in education from 1995–2005 using survey data from 845 coffee farming households in Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico. Results from a household fixed-effects model show that household participation in a Fair Trade-organic cooperative contributed to about a 0.7 year increase in schooling for girls. US migration opportunities appear to have even stronger positive impacts on schooling for females. Although participation in Fair Trade-organic cooperatives appears also to have increased male schooling, increased migration opportunities have had an indeterminate effect for males.