William G. Boggess

Technology Adoption Decisions under Irreversibility and Uncertainty: An Ex Ante Appproach

Empirical results demonstrate that uncertainty about costs and requirements for environmental compliance is an important determinant of dairy producers& investment behavior. Ex ante forecasting of how uncertainty and irreversibility are likely to affect producers& responsiveness to agricultural technologies has implications for the design of environmental policies. Simulation modeling methods are described. The empirical analysis focuses on Texas producers& propensity to adopt free-stall dairy housing. Free-stall investments offer advantages for both productivity-augmentation and pollution abatement, yet uncertainty and irreversibility are obstacles to adoption. Implications of this ex ante paradigm for policy design and implementation are discussed.

Government Decision Making and Program Performance: The Case of the Conservation Reserve Program

Performance of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in meeting the political preferences of its administrators is highly sensitive to the choice of eligibility, bid solicitation, and bid selection criteria used in making program implementation decisions. Decisions made in the first year of CRP implementation led to suboptimal results; net government cost could have been reduced while simultaneously increasing the extent to which erosion and supply control objectives were met. Simulation of the outcomes for a fully enrolled reserve under alternative implementation schemes indicates that future performance can be improved by manipulating key control variables to directly target preferences.

A Bioeconomic Simulation Analysis Of Irrigation Investments

Agriculture is unique with respect to the importance of weather variability on output and profits. Irrigation has long been recognized as a means of increasing yields and profits in the arid west, and recently interest in investments in supplemental irrigation in humid areas has accelerated (Brown and Skinner; Hewitt et al.; Levins; Clouser et al., Worm et al.; Schoney and Massie).

Estimation and use of the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation to model non-normal correlated random variables

During the past .20 years, there has been growing recognition of the consequences of the randomness of crop yields and prices for farm management and agricultural policy decisions. Concomitantly, researchers have recognized the possibility and implications of the non-normality of yields and prices. This study demonstrates a method for estimating multivariate non-normality in crop yields and prices over time, using the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation of corn, soya bean and wheat yields. The resulting estimates are used to simulate a multivariate distribution of crop yields.

A Bioeconomic Simulation Approach to Multi-Species Insect Management

Classical approaches to the economics of pest management have focused almost exclusively on single-species models. This study develops and implements a methodology with which to evaluate multi-species, non-stochastic, managerial decisions subject to stochastic elements of the plant-insect system. Multi-species insect management strategies (combinations of scouting interval, threshold value, and choice of pesticide) are analyzed using a physiological mechanistic soybean plant growth model coupled to three insect population dynamics models. Preliminary results indicate that net returns are maximized and variance is reduced with lower thresholds and more frequent scouting than current recommendations.

A Sector Analysis of Alternative Income Support and Soil Conservation Policies

For nearly five decades Congress has attempted to legislate both higher farm incomes and soil conservation. A national, interregional, demand-endogenous, separable programming model is used to analyze the potential of alternative policies to achieve simultaneously the dual goals of increased farm income and reduced soil erosion. The analysis indicates that a conservation-oriented land retirement policy can be designed to achieve an increase in net farm income equivalent to a traditional general land retirement policy, while simultaneously achieving significant reductions in gross soil erosion, chemical input use, and direct government program costs.