| dc.description.abstract | In this dissertation, I estimate the value of soil and water quality improvements using revealed and stated preferences of anglers and farmers, respectively. I also identify the causal effect of a groundwater management program in India. I find that the standard approach to valuing changes in environmental quality may often underestimate the true marginal benefits of potential improvements. I find that farmers are willing to pay for some soil quality improvements separate from any benefits realized in changes in crop revenues or production costs, which suggests that the current approach to estimating the benefits of soil conservation may not be capturing the full set of benefits for farmers. Finally, I find that a large groundwater management program in India had - at best - moderate success in conserving groundwater.
In the first essay, I explore the value of short- and long-term changes in water quality. The economic value of water quality improvements is often assessed using short-term changes in quality measures. Meanwhile, water quality regulators seek long-term, permanent changes. I use a pooled cross-section of angler surveys administered in Texas from 2001 - 2015 and a panel of water quality data to measure the effect of short-term and long-term variation in water quality on anticipated angler utility. Using a two-stage estimation process, I find that anglers are willing to pay substantially more for long-term changes in water quality than for short-term changes. Approaches that capture only short-term variation in water quality may thus result in significant undervaluation.
In the second essay, I explore the value of soil quality improvements. The on-farm value of soil quality improvements has historically been captured by changes in production costs or crop revenues. I design a discrete choice experiment that captures the willingness-to-pay from farmers to improve three manageable soil quality characteristics, providing for the first time an estimate of the value of soil quality improvements without involving the potentially confounding effects of conservation practices. I find that, on average, farmers are willing
iito pay more for improvements in water infiltration than organic matter which realistically occur with the adoption of a no-till regime. When I incorporate preference heterogeneity through the use of mixed logit models, the 95% confidence intervals for all willingness-to- pay measures include zero, even within distinct sub-groups. This suggests that while some farmers are willing to pay more than others for soil quality improvement, there is a lot of heterogeneity and many farmers may not be willing to pay anything to improve soil quality.
In the third essay, I identify the effect of a participatory groundwater management pro- gram on groundwater levels in India. The Andhra Pradesh Farmer-Managed Groundwater System (APFAMGS) was a multi-year program that provided farmers with tools to man- age groundwater collectively through constant monitoring of local aquifers. Using a two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences model, I find the program had some moderate success in the intra-year groundwater levels throughout a full agricultural year. The success of the pro- gram, however, did not extend to average groundwater levels nor was the success consistent across years. | en |
