Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

In this dissertation, I model household behavior with respect to incentives and natural resources, with the goal of understanding the effects that individual's decisions have on their environment, and how the benefits of natural resources accrue to households. In my first chapter, I develop a spatial model of cattle ranchers responses to wolves and model their response to exogenous payments. Effective payments for conservation are an important tool to provide transfers between those who derive utility from wildlife and those who bear the economic costs in order to reduce poaching and promote coexistence. I build upon previous models to consider how these payments should be applied over space when farmers face heterogeneous depredation risk and thus heterogeneous incentives to poach wildlife. I find that while ex-post payments induce higher stocking rates as suggested by the previous literature, the effect is small compared to the ex-ante payment level needed to push farmers into the corner solution of zero poaching via ex-ante payments. I compare commonly used uniform ex-post compensation to spatially targeted compensation, finding that poaching can be reduced further by targeted payments given a limited government agency budget, and that, if ex-ante payments can be targeted, both types of payments can reduce poaching with similar costs. This work contributes to the literature on impact evaluation for payments for ecosystem services to promote conservation by considering spatial heterogeneity, and is the first to combine spatial risk mapping with farmer response to conservation payments. This work has important implications for the design and implementation of payments for conservation. In my second chapter, I quantify the effect of forest cover in mitigating acute respiratory infections (ARIs) in rural children in India. Acute respiratory infections, dependent on both indoor and outdoor air quality, have serious effects on the long-term well being of children. (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Daniela Miteva (Advisor); Jon Einar Flatnes (Committee Member); Mario Miranda (Committee Member); Henry Allan Klaiber (Committee Member); Sathya Gopalakrishnan (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics; Environmental Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

Ohio's Scenic Rivers Program (OSRP) designates high-quality streams to protect pristine riparian corridors. My first essay uses a large data set of home sales across Ohio to identify the effect of designation on local housing values using temporal and spatial regressions. I find an average capitalization effect of approximately 6-8% for homes within 1km of designated streams that is robust to numerous sample definitions. This finding provides a unique ex-ante – ex-post hedonic analysis of scenic river designation to assist local governments' decisions on future program expansions. More fundamentally, this essay demonstrates how the value of environmental amenities may be dependent on a promise of future protection. The United States' Federal Crop Insurance Program (FCIP) is a critical support structure for the country's farm financial security, but its size and centrally controlled prices allow for large efficiency losses through moral hazard and adverse selection. My second essay investigates successive droughts as one potential source of these issues. I hypothesize that successive droughts represent a right-tail risk that is predictable enough to incentivize adverse selection into the FCIP. My results show that successive droughts substantially and significantly lower irrigation's ability to mitigate losses from drought. This relationship carries over from lost acreage to loss ratios, a signal that the FCIP pricing cycles allow for this temporal adverse selection. The Federal Crop Insurance Program (FCIP) has made significant progress in achieving universal coverage; however, expansion to specialty crop products remains a challenge. My third essay demonstrates a Machine Learning process with which I use historical data on weather and crop losses from ‘training' counties to predict indemnification from a specialty crop in counties out of sample. I show that this method produces an average loss ratio comparable to USDA RMA performance without any geographic weig (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Henry Klaiber (Advisor); Zoe Plakias (Committee Member); Roselyn Lee-Won (Committee Member); Brent Sohngen (Committee Member); Mario Miranda (Committee Member) Subjects: Agricultural Economics; Environmental Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

Commercial banks in the United States play an important role as the main liquidity providers for farm businesses. In recent decades, these liquidity providers have experienced rapid transitions due to regulatory changes and competitive market shifts. The next three studies examine different implications of banking sector regulation and consolidation. The first essay examines the impact of the Basel III bank regulation, which is one of the most significant bank regulations since the Great Recession, on lending activities by agricultural commercial banks. Using a difference-in-differences approach with bank panel data obtained from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, I find that the new Basel III regulation lowered the lending growth rate of agricultural lending institutions. The second essay evaluates the outcomes of agricultural bank consolidations. Using bank transformation data from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council and panel fixed effect regression models, this study examines whether agricultural bank acquisitions result in improved performance for the acquiring banks. The outcomes of agricultural bank acquisitions by types of acquirers with different geographical, cultural, and product knowledge are examined, and the results show that there is no considerable gain as a result of agricultural bank acquisitions. The third essay examines comprehensive determinants of community bank acquisitions by utilizing a novel approach designed to address the issue of sample selection in the literature. After creating all possible acquisition scenarios between 2012 and 2018 to create counterfactuals, rare event logistic estimation is utilized. Results show that relative differences between the acquiring national banks and target community banks matter, and the acquisitions are triggered for the goals of achieving diversification and capability deployment.

Committee: Ani Katchova (Advisor); Abdoul Sam (Committee Member); Wuyang Hu (Committee Member) Subjects: Agricultural Economics; Agriculture

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2018, East Asian Studies

Since the 1960's China's agricultural system has gone through drastic changes. Modernization of this system necessitated adoption of key innovations, including new seed varieties, farm management practices, and the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This thesis examines the impacts of three major transformations of China's agricultural economy, including the Socialist Period, the Green Revolution, and the Reform Period. A production function was used to estimate the effect of different agricultural inputs, regions, and decades for China's provincial grain production, including wheat, maize, and rice. The ordinary least squared estimates demonstrate the changes in China's agricultural system in this period. The North China Plain's (NCP) agricultural system was used as a case study, and demonstrated the changes in intensity of grain production from 1960-2016. Increasing chemical fertilizer use was found to be the most important change in China's agricultural inputs, as changes in other inputs such as land, labor, and agricultural machinery were constrained. Chemical fertilizer use was found to be more effective for grain production in the NCP compared to other provinces. However, high or poorly balanced chemical fertilizer applications in this region has important environmental health consequences. This fertilizer intensive production is reinforced by Chinese farmers' needs for ensured income and management practices introduced during the Green Revolution. China's environmental policy has had limited success in addressing these problems.

Committee: Karen Mancl (Committee Chair); Hongtao Yi (Committee Member); H. Allen Klaiber (Committee Co-Chair); Sathya Gopalakrishnan (Committee Member) Subjects: Agricultural Economics; Agriculture; Asian Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

In this dissertation, I present three essays in which I explore how disparity in access to assets influences intra-household decisions and how risk and financial constraints influence differential gender decisions in agricultural investments, with an aim to formulate evidence-based policy solutions. In essay 1, I empirically examine the role of women's land ownership, either alone or jointly, as a means of improving their intra-household bargaining power in the areas of own healthcare, major household purchases, and visiting family or relatives. Using the 2001 and 2011 Nepal Demographic and Health Surveys, I find two important results. First, accounting for the endogeneity of land ownership with inverse probability weighting and instrumental variable methods makes its impact on empowerment higher. Previous research in this area had largely ignored the potential endogeneity of land ownership. Second, the impact is generally stronger in 2011 than in 2001. As evidenced in a number of empirical studies, the increase in women's bargaining power can in turn translate into a redirection of resources towards women's preferences, including higher investment in human capital of the household such as education, health, and nutrition. Therefore, this study indicates that in places where agriculture is the main source of economy for women, policies enhancing land rights equity have the potential to increase women's empowerment and associated beneficial welfare effects. In Essay 2, I investigate whether coupling agricultural loans with micro-level and meso-level drought index insurance can stimulate the demand and supply of credit and increase technology adoption. To this end, in partnership with 14 rural banks and the Ghana Agricultural Insurance Pool, we implemented a randomized control trial in northern Ghana that targeted maize farmers organized in credit groups. The empirical analysis indicates that on the demand side, coupling loans with micro-insurance increases the like (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Abdoul Sam (Advisor); Mario Miranda (Advisor) Subjects: Agricultural Economics; Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1987, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1962, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Home Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1955, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

N/A

Committee: Ralph Sherman (Advisor) Subjects: Agricultural Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

This research develops three essays on environmental issues in Brazil. The first two essays look at the effects of rural credit and land-use change in Brazil. Previous economic models have come to the conclusion that rural credit loans extended to farmers increases deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon region by encouraging land expansion. The first essay is an analysis of deforestation in the Legal Amazon region. The paper uses municipality-level panel data to examine the effects of rural credit on deforestation while controlling for land constraints. The hypothesis is that farmers that are land constrained do not use rural credit to deforest. The land constraints that are considered include high population pressures, abundance of low quality soil, high areas of savannah, and low quality transportation networks. These constraints are included in a regression analyses to explain deforestation through the use of dummy variables and the interaction of the dummy variables with rural credit. Key findings suggest that credit in municipalities with high rural populations is associated with a decrease in deforestation. Credit in municipalities with low quality soil is associated with an increase in deforestation, suggesting the credit incentivizes the clearing of otherwise marginal land. No conclusions can be made about the effects of cerrado and poor transportation networks. The second paper is a countrywide analysis of biofuel crop acreage response to credit availability and availability risk using municipality-level panel data. In the first step, the model employs a participation model using a logit regression to describe the factors that determine whether or not a given municipality planted a particular crop. In the second step, an OLS-regression is used to describe crop acreage as a function of acreage in the previous time period, expected prices, and rural credit. The analysis compares the acreage response of sugarcane to that of beans, coffee, soybeans, ric (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Timothy Haab (Advisor); Ian Sheldon (Committee Member); Brent Sohngen (Committee Member) Subjects: Agricultural Economics; Environmental Economics

Artium Baccalaureus (AB), Ohio University, 2014, French

Pendant que les communautes rurales se trouvent de plus en plus poussees vers l’urbanisation, les paysans francais s’accrochent a leurs proprietes et a leur heritage. L’agriculture mecanisee, alimentee par un haut taux d’investissement et des developpements technologiques, remplace le besoin du travail manuel a la campagne pendant que les methodes productivistes augment brusquement la reserve des produits agricoles aux niveaux excessifs, font baisser les prix, et saisissent la part de marche. Bien que les grandes corporations agroalimentaires en France soient mieux regulees que celles dans d’autres pays tels que les Etats-Unis, la legislation au niveau national et au niveau europeen favorisent les operations agricoles plus efficaces au depens des petites fermes traditionnelles. Cette these part en exploration des chances de reussite de redynamiser les communautes rurales durables en France, et les benefices atteignables si l’on soutient des methodes de culture traditionnelles et moins intensives. As rural communities find themselves continuously pushed towards urbanization, the French provincial-farmer class clings to its landholdings and its heritage. New investments in expensive farming equipment and techniques are replacing the need for manual labor in the countryside as productivist methods hike the supply of agricultural products to excessive levels, depress prices, and seize market share. While large food and agriculture corporations in France are more tightly regulated than they are in countries such as the United States, legislation at both the national and European levels have favored more efficient agricultural operations to the detriment of traditional small farms. This thesis explores the viability of reinvigorating sustainable rural communities in France and the benefits of supporting less-intensive, more traditional farming practices.

Committee: Lois Vines Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: Agricultural Economics; Agriculture; Business Costs; Conservation; Demographics; Economics; Environmental Economics; Environmental Health; Environmental Management; Environmental Studies; European Studies; Food Science; Modern History

Master of Arts in Economics, Youngstown State University, 2010, Lariccia School of Accounting and Finance

Energy is an important input for production of all kinds, including agriculture. From 1992 to 2007, the agricultural market underwent many different changes with respect to the inputs they utilized, as well as the prices they paid for them. Among these changes, fuel prices displayed the most severe volatility. Using a Transcendental Logarithmic Production Function, the price elasticity of substitution was estimated for all agricultural inputs during the time period studied in order to determine how farms change production allocations due to increasing energy prices. It was found that price elasticities were very low between energy and other inputs, suggesting that farms do not change their input allocations due to increases in energy prices.

Committee: Joseph Palardy PhD (Advisor); Tod Porter PhD (Committee Member); Tomi Ovaska PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics; Energy

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2009, Environmental Science

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) was established by the Food SecurityAct of 1985 to pay farmers to retire highly erodible and environmentally sensitive cropland and pasture from production. These retired lands have been under increased pressure for conversion to row crops given the relatively high crop prices that have prevailed until recent months. This thesis compared CRP land to row crop production using three methods financial analysis, economic analysis, and emergy evaluation. This project also considered the possibility of using CRP land for bioenergy production in Ohio and considered how much farmers would need to be paid for their biomass to make harvesting a financially optimal choice. A financial analysis was carried out to determine which factors would have the greatest influence on whether farmers will put conservation land back into production. The analyses showed that with high corn and soybean prices, $5.25 and $13.30 per bushel respectively, crop production almost always had higher returns than CRP. However, under lower crop prices, $3.25 and $7.70 per bushel respectively, CRP land always had a higher return. To address the economic value of CRP crop production, this analysis considered the benefits and costs to society of having land enrolled in either system. The results of this analysis show the economic value of average productivity CRP land to be -$19.01 per acre per year. This means the cost of CRP to society is greater than its benefits. However, CRP is still economically superior to crop production, except under the highest crop prices considered. Emergy evaluation was used to compare the sustainability of CRP land and crop production (corn and soybeans) using an ecologically based methodology. CRP land was shown to be more sustainable than corn and soybean production due to its reliance on renewable inputs. The study also suggested that incoming soil erosion and water runoff from adjoining fields are two of the most important inputs to (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Fredrick Hitzhusen PhD (Advisor); David Barker PhD (Committee Member); Frederick Michel PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Agriculture; Economics; Environmental Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics

The first two chapters look at differences between individual and group decision-making in economic environments. Using laboratory experiments the first chapter shows that group preferences for self-interest differ from those of individuals, but the direction and magnitude depends on the procedure governing how groups make decisions. The second chapter looks at the dynamics of group decision-making, which leads to an argument for looking at group decisions through the lens of reciprocity. The third chapter focuses on country level trends in agriculture to empirically investigate whether countries that increase agricultural productivity increase or decrease land in agriculture.

Committee: Steven Wu (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General