Since the 1930s, federal policy has exerted significant indirect influence on cropland values through capitalization of benefits from commodity supply control programs. Several studies have used a variety of data and approaches to provide the limited quantitative estimates of the extent to which the benefits of access to federal farm program payments are capitalized into cropland values (e.g., Duffy et al.; Goodwin and Ortalo-Magne; Herriges, Barickman, and Shogren; Just and Miranowski; Shoemaker, Anderson, and Hrubovcak). The issue continues to be pertinent at this time, especially given the enactment of the Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 (FAIR), under which all federal commodity program payments are to be phased out by the end of 2002.The purpose of this paper is to measure the extent to which direct government payments are currently capitalized into cropland values, providing estimates of the amount by which cropland values could fall, ceteris paribus, as the result of FAIR. The analysis employs microlevel cropland values data from the redesigned USDA farmland values data collection effort and uses two related, but quite different, regression-based approaches, one the standard linear (parametric) estimator and the other a nonparametric estimator. The empirical results are preceded by a brief discussion of the' current policy setting and past research on the role of
While many studies have estimated the impacts of air pollution on crop yields on experimental plots, few have estimated these impacts under actual farm production conditions. This study econometrically estimates the impact of air pollution on corn and soybean yields, controlling for weather, soil quality and management practices, using farm-level data for the eastern United States. Ozone pollution was found to reduce yields for both crops. The mean elasticity of yield with respect to ozone exposure was − 0.19 for corn and − 0.54 for soybeans. The benefits of ozone standards to protect crops, measured in terms of crop revenues, range from $17 to $82 million depending on the stringency of the standard. Over 85 percent of the revenue gains are captured by three states: Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia.
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