Research
Working Paper
“The Impact of Conservation Reserve Program on Local Agricultural Expenses” with Ruiqing Miao & Joshua Duke, Revise & Resubmit at Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy
Abstract: We find economically modest, yet statistically significant, impact of county-level Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) enrollment on local agricultural expenses. A 1% increase in CRP enrollment reduces total agricultural expenses by 0.046%. Considerable impact heterogeneity exists across expense categories and regions. For a 1% increase in CRP acreage, seed and plant, labor, chemical, rent, fertilizer, and supply and repair expenses decline the most, ranging from 0.071% to 0.185%, while animal and fuel expenses increase by 0.215% and 0.060%, respectively. Ag-service, feed, interest, tax, and depreciation expenses are unresponsive. The negative effect is most pronounced in the Midwest and the Great Plains.
“The Efficiency and Spatial Effects of Pecuniary Externalities on Land Value Taxation: Evidence from an Economic Laboratory Experiment” with Joshua M. Duke & Tianhang Gao
Abstract: We use an economic laboratory experiment to investigate how pecuniary externalities affect the anticipated advantages of land value taxation. An interdependency in the form of pecuniary externalities arises because a given landowner’s neighbors make land-use-investment decisions, which are transmitted through the pricing system via taxation and which ultimately increase the landowner’s taxes. Experimental results show that, relative to an identical setting without a decision-making interdependency, a modest externality increases tax revenue, lowers landowner earnings, but does not affect urban density patterns (i.e., “urban sprawl”). Other results compare outcomes of land value taxation to the more common uniform property taxation, when allowing for interdependency. The results show that overall social wealth increases when governments switch from uniform property tax to land value taxation; however, the distributive effects are more complicated than prior experiments recognize. Specifically, pecuniary externalities lead to increased tax revenue but lower landowner earnings. The latter result offers new insight into why landowners often object to the adoption of land value taxation. The policy implications suggest that support for land value taxation might increase by adjusting institutions to reallocate land value taxation’s anticipated benefits from governments to landowners by (1) lowering land tax rates below revenue-neutral estimations or (2) developing accompanying tax redistribution mechanisms.
Works in Progress
“Marketing Options for Producers and Agribusiness in the Southeast” * Abstract: We use a discrete choice experiment to analyze how social affinity attributes impact consumer’s willingness to pay for food products in the Southeast.