Catherine Louise Kling

Iowa State University | ISU · Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD)

The increasing frequency of extreme events, exogenous and endogenous, poses challenges for our societies. The current pandemic is a case in point; but "once-in-a-century" weather events are also becoming more common, leading to erosion, wildfire and even volcanic events that change ecosystems and disturbance regimes, threaten the sustainability of...

Significance Water quality is severely degraded in landscapes cultivated for intensive corn and soybean production. Current water quality policy focuses on reducing nutrient and sediment losses from agricultural fields, yet recent studies have highlighted important roles of near-channel areas as sources of sediment and sinks for nitrogen. We develo...

US investment to decrease pollution in rivers, lakes, and other surface waters has exceeded $1.9 trillion since 1960, and has also exceeded the cost of most other US environmental initiatives. These investments come both from the 1972 Clean Water Act and the largely voluntary efforts to control pollution from agriculture and urban runoff. This pape...

In this paper, we explore ways in which the theoretical constructs of scope and adding up can inform and improve the practice of benefit transfer. Specifically, we examine how the stated preference literature on scope and adding up can inform three critical steps in benefits transfer: study site selection, including studies to select for use in a m...

The Upper Mississippi River Basin and Ohio-Tennessee River Basin comprise the majority of the United States Corn Belt region, resulting in degraded Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico water quality. To address the water quality implications of increased biofuel production, biofuel scenarios were tested with a Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT)...

Land use change can significantly affect the provision of ecosystem services and the effects could be exacerbated by projected climate change. We quantify ecosystem services of bioenergy-based land use change and estimate the potential changes of ecosystem services due to climate change projections. We considered 17 bioenergy-based scenarios with M...

The implications and value of Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT)-based simulations of the productive potential and water quality impacts associated with switchgrass, Miscanthus, or corn stover removal biofuel cropping systems are discussed. Specifically, the three accompanying studies describe the water quality implications of adopting the three...

Several biofuel cropping scenarios were evaluated with an improved version of Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) as part of the CenUSA Bioenergy consortium for the Boone River Watershed (BRW), which drains about 2,370 km² in north central Iowa. The adoption of corn stover removal, switchgrass, and/or Miscanthus biofuel cropping systems was simul...

Food, energy, and water (FEW) systems play a fundamental role in determining societal health and economic well-being. However, current and expected changes in climate, population, and land use place these systems under considerable stress. To improve policies that target these challenges, this review highlights the need for integrating biophysical...

We assess the trade-offs and synergies involved in reducing agriculture-generated nutrient loads with different levels of resilience. We optimize the selection of least-cost patterns of agricultural conservation practices for both the expected performance of the conservation actions and its variance. Securing nutrient loads with a higher level of r...

We assess empirically how agricultural lands should be used to produce the highest valued outputs, which include food, energy, and environmental goods and services. We explore efficiency tradeoffs associated with allocating land between food and bioenergy and use a set of market prices and nonmarket environmental values to value the outputs produce...

We assess empirically how agricultural lands should be used to produce the highest valued outputs, which include food, energy, and environmental goods and services. We explore efficiency tradeoffs associated with allocating land between food and bioenergy and use a set of market prices and nonmarket environmental values to value the outputs produce...

Significance Hypoxic (low-oxygen) zones threaten an increasing number of marine ecosystems. Hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico is the second largest in the world. The United States has a policy goal of reducing the average zone to 5,000 km ² . Reductions in nutrients from cropland in the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin are needed to achieve this goa...

In this paper, we discuss the importance of developing integrated assessment models to support the design and implementation of policies to address water quality problems associated with agricultural pollution. We describe a new modelling system, LUMINATE, which links land use decisions made at the field scale in the Upper Mississippi, Ohio and Ten...

Effects of agricultural land management practices on surface runoff are evident at local scales, but evidence for watershed-scale impacts is limited. In this study, we used the Soil and Water Assessment Tool model to assess changes in downstream flood risks under different land uses for the large, intensely agricultural, Raccoon River watershed in...

This paper provides a convergent validity test of two types of multinomial choice questions vis-à-vis a dichotomous choice question by formally testing whether these stated preference elicitation question formats provide comparable welfare estimates. In particular, a dichotomous choice question, a traditional multinomial choice question, and a modi...

Nonpoint-source water pollution remains a major issue despite decades of research and sizable conservation programs. We suggest that by taking advantage of contemporary modeling and optimization approaches, good approximations to physical relationships can be constructed so that even in the presence of unobservable field emissions and nonlinear fat...

This paper has developed and estimated a valuation model for water quality improvement. After reviewing more than 100 studies, we set up a data set that has 332 valuations from 38 distinct studies. Based on the data set, we estimate a linear valuation model, which can then be used to predict the mean willingness to pay by households living in a giv...

On March 23, 19S9, the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound and released over 250,000 barrels of crude oil, resulting in 1300 miles oiled shoreline. The Exxon spill ignited a debate about the appropriate compensation for damages suffered, and among economists, a debate concerning adequacy of methods to value public goods, parti...

The purpose of this review and analysis is to provide a basic understanding of the issues related to worldwide hypoxic zones and the range of economic questions sorely in need of answers. We begin by describing the causes and extent of hypoxic zones worldwide, followed by a review of the evidence concerning ecological effects of the condition and i...

Although climate change has largely been removed from the federal policy agenda of the United States in the near term, the continued reliance on fossil fuels as a dominant energy source leaves many analysts to conclude that climate policy will eventually reappear on that agenda. We present a review of recent research related to the design and imple...

While biofuels may yield renewable fuel benefits, there could be downsides in terms of water quality and other environmental stressors, particularly if corn is relied upon exclusively as the feedstock. The consequences of increased corn production will depend importantly on where (and how) the additional corn is grown, which, in turn, depends on th...

The Wadeable Streams Assessment was completed in 2004 with the aim of evaluating the biological condition of streams while also collecting data on physical and chemical stressors of the system. The characteristics of the process by which agricultural sources contribute to poor water quality creates difficult challenges for the design and use of pol...

Manski (1999) proposed an approach for dealing with a particular form respondent uncertainty in discrete choice settings, particularly relevant in survey based research when the uncertainty stems from the incomplete description of the choice scenarios. Specifically, he suggests eliciting choice probabilities from respondents rather than their singl...

Evidence from laboratory experiments suggests that important disparities exist between willingness to pay (WTP) and compensation demanded for the same good. This study advances, and experimentally tests, a new explanation of the WTP/WTA disparity—a dynamic theory based on the presence of commitment costs. We find that the commitment cost theory com...

In 2008, the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico, measuring 20 720 km2, was one of the two largest reported since measurement of the zone began in 1985. The extent of the hypoxic zone is related to nitrogen and phosphorous loadings originating on agricultural fields in the upper Midwest. This study combines the tools of evolutionary computation with...

In this essay we examine the coevolution and cross-fertilization of environmental and agricultural economics over the past century. We discuss the key role that agricultural economists have played in the intellectual development of environmental economics. We focus on three primary contributions: incentive design, nonmarket valuation, and joint det...

We investigate the extent to which dichotomous choice referenda responses are shaped by whether the individual believes the survey itself will ultimately impact policy. Using survey data from the Iowa Lakes Project, we test this supposition. Specifically, we employ a Bayesian treatment effect model in which the degree of perceived consequentiality,...

No abstract available at this time.

Copyright 2009 by Subhra Bhattacharjee, Catherine Kling and Joseph Herriges. All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies.

Employing a unique and rich data set of water quality attributes in conjunction with detailed household characteristics and trip information, we develop a mixed logit model of recreational lake usage and undertake thorough model specification and fitting procedures to identify the best set of explanatory variables, and their functional form for the...

This paper provides estimates of the cost associated with inducing substantial conversion of land from production of traditional crops to switchgrass and its potential environmental consequences. Higher traditional crop prices due to increased demand for corn from the ethanol industry has increased the relative advantage that row crops have over sw...

While biofuels may yield renewable fuel benefits, there could be downsides in terms of water quality and other environmental stressors, particularly if corn is relied upon exclusively as the feedstock. In this article, we describe a modeling system that links agricultural land use decisions in the Upper Mississippi River Basin (UMRB) to economic dr...

Improved assessment of flow, sediment, and nutrient losses from watersheds with computer simulation models is needed in order to identify and control nonpoint source pollution. One model, currently under consideration by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for watershed assessments, is the Soil Water and Assessment Tool (SWAT). In this report,...

In the two volumes of readings collected here, we have chosen a sampling of some of the most essential and/or inspirational papers for understanding the state of the art in the field of revealed preference methods. The papers we have chosen cover the gamut of methods that are typically classified as revealed preference approaches including: recreat...

This article examines the status of women in the environmental economics profession in terms of their representation and impact. Three indicators are used to gauge the status of women in the profession. They are the representation of women in academia in the United States and Canada, the publication profiles of female environmental economists, and...

We provide estimates of the costs associated with inducing substantial conversion of land from production of traditional crops to switchgrass. Higher traditional crop prices due to increased demand for corn from the ethanol industry has increased the relative advantage that row crops have over switchgrass. Results indicate that farmers will convert...

This study investigates the carbon sequestration potential and co-benefits from policies aimed at retiring agricultural land in the Upper Mississippi River Basin, a large, heavily agricultural area. In addition to empirically measuring environmental co-benefits, we also compute economic transfers, which have sometimes been referred to as a co-benef...

Agricultural Policy and Conservation Programs in the United States: New Futures, New Benefits

Nonpoint source pollution in intensively managed agricultural landscapes is of great concern to the general population, farmers and policymakers, as it impacts local water quality and can have large downstream effects, as in the case of hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. In this study, we outline a methodology to simultaneously assess economic costs an...

In this paper, we examine the design of permit trading programs when the objective is to minimize the cost of achieving an ex ante pollution target, that is, one that is defined in expectation rather than an ex post deterministic value. We consider two potential sources of uncertainty, the presence of either of which can make our model appropriate:...

This paper is the third component in a four part series that together describe an integrated modeling framework that has been constructed for the Upper Mississippi River Basin.

Recreation demand models typically incorporate measures of the physical attributes of recreational sites; e.g., Secchi depth or phosphorous levels in case of water quality. Moreover, most studies show that individuals do respond to these physical characteristics in choosing where to recreate. However, the question remains as to whether the availabl...

In this paper, we study the social efficiency of private carbon markets that include trading in agricultural soil carbon sequestration when there are significant cobenefits (positive environmental externalities) associated with the practices that sequester carbon. Likewise, we investigate the efficiency of government run conservation programs that...

The United States has invested large sums of resources in multiple conservation programs for agriculture over the past century. In this paper we focus on the impacts of program interactions. Specifically, using an integrated economic and bio-physical modeling framework, we consider the impacts of the presence of working land programs on a land reti...

The development of accurate non-point source pollution assessment technologies allows the implementation of more efficient policies than can be undertaken in their absence. This study estimates the value of accurate measurement technology by estimating the gains from implementing a more efficient policy, one that targets agricultural non-point sour...

This study investigates the carbon sequestration potential and co-benefits from policies aimed at retiring agricultural land in the Upper Mississippi River Basin, a large, heavily agricultural area. We extend the empirical measurement of co-benefits from the previous focus on environmental benefits to include economic transfers. These transfers hav...

In this paper, we study the social efficiency of private carbon markets that include trading in agricultural soil carbon sequestration when there are significant co-benefits (positive environmental externalities) associated with the practices that sequester carbon. Likewise, we investigate the efficiency of government run conservation programs that...

This paper documents the methodology used to calculate the costs of adopting new conservation practices or changing land use, in order to improve water quality in Iowa. We have identified a wide ranging set of conservation practices to be put in place in a policy scenario designed to improve the State's surface water quality. The practices include...

This study investigates the implications of treating different environmental benefits as the primary target of policy design. We focus on two scenarios, estimating for both of them in-stream sediment, nutrient loadings, and carbon sequestration. In the first, we assess the impact of a program designed to improve water quality in Iowa on carbon sequ...

Land use changes to sequester carbon also provide "co-benefits," some of which (for example, water quality) have attracted at least as much attention as carbon storage. The non-separability of these co-benefits presents a challenge for policy design. If carbon markets are employed, then social efficiency will depend on how we take into account co-b...

This paper incorporates a rich set of physical water quality attributes, as well as site and household characteristics, into a model of recreational lake usage in Iowa. Our analysis shows individuals are responsive to physical water quality measures. Willingness-to-pay estimates are reported based on improvements in these measures.

The study develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the allocation of conservation funds via selectively offering incentive payments to farmers for enrolling in one of two mutually exclusive agricultural conservation programs: retiring land from production or changing farming practices on land that remains in production. We investigate how the...

This study empirically estimates the multiple benefits of a subsidy policy that would offer payments to farmers in return for the adoption of conservation tillage, and compares the outcomes of alternative targeting designs for such a policy. The least-cost incentive payment policy schemes are simulated for the State of Iowa by using the data for ro...

The authors are graduate research assistant, assistant professor, and professor, at the Department of Economics, Iowa State University. We thank John Beghin, Brent Hueth, Larry Karp, Andrew Plantinga, Art Small, Josh Zivin, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at Columbia University, UC Davis, the Heartand Environmental and Resource Eco...

The growth in conservation programs has created a need for modeling frameworks capable of measuring microlevel behavioral responses and macrolevel landscape changes. This paper presents an empirical model that predicts farmers' production practices and the resulting levels of agricultural runoffs at more than 42,000 agricultural sites in the upper-...

The development of accurate non-point source pollution assessment technologies allows the implementation of more efficient policies than can be undertaken in their absence. This study estimates the value of accurate measurement technology by estimating the gains from implementing a more efficient policy, one that targets agricultural non-point sour...

This study investigates the environmental impacts of several forms of policies that offer farmers subsides in return for the adoption of conservation tillage. The policies differ as to whether the tillage practice or one of several environmental benefits is targeted. We develop an Environmental Lorenz Curve which fully represents the performance of...

In this paper we consider the theoretical and empirical ramifications of welfare measurement in revealed preference models when weak complementarity does not hold. In the context of a Kuhn–Tucker model of recreation demand we show that, while it is possible to estimate preferences that do not appear to exhibit weak complementarity, the calculation...

A modeling system has been constructed for the Upper Mississippi River Basin (UMRB), which covers approximately 492,000 km2 in parts of eight states in the north central U.S. The modeling system is built around the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model, which is designed to assess the effects of land use, climate, and soil conditions on strea...

In this paper, we examine command-and-control (CAC) policies and market-based instruments (MBI) in the context of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). The CRP, an MBI in the form of subsidies, is by far the largest agro-environmental policy implemented to date. We compare the environmental performance of the CRP as implemented to a few counterfa...

This article models the recreation demand for Iowa wetlands, combining survey data on both actual usage patterns (i.e., revealed preferences (RPs)) and anticipated changes to those patterns under hypothetical increases in trip costs (i.e., stated preferences (SPs)). We formulate and test specific hypotheses concerning potential sources of bias in e...

This paper is a study of the optimal emission standards under uncertain pollution damages and transaction costs associated with policy changes. The authors show that, in many situations, either policy changes should be avoided or they should be reduced in scale due to the presence of future transaction costs. Under this constraint, policy persisten...

The development of technologies for accurate field-scale carbon assessment allows the implementation of more efficient policies than can be implemented in their absence. We estimate the value of accurate measurement technology by estimating the gains from implementing a more efficient policy, one that targets carbon reductions at the field scale bu...

We investigate the environmental impacts of several forms of policies that offer farmers subsides in return for adoption of conservation tillage. The policies differ on whether the tillage practice or one of the environmental benefits is targeted. We develop an environmental Lorenz curve that fully represents the performance of the targeting polici...

This study advances, and experimentally tests, a new explanation for the disparity between willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA)—a dynamic neoclassical theory based on the presence of commitment costs. While to date neoclassical models have not explained the observed data patterns well, we find that the commitment cost theory i...

In this chapter, we outline the historical development of the theory and empirical implementation of recreation demand models that rely on revealed preference data. Revealed preference data and approaches are those that are based on observed behavior, with surveys typically used to collect information from individual recreators on their use of vari...

In this study, we estimate empirically the multiple benefits of a subsidy policy that would offer payments to farmers in return for the adoption of conservation tillage and compare the outcomes of alternative targeting designs for such a policy. Using data for roughly 12,000 National Resource Inventory (NRI) points, we simulate for the state of Iow...

Because of payoff uncertainties combined with risk aversion and/or real options, farmers may demand a premium in order to adopt conservation tillage practices, over and above the compensation for the expected profit losses (if any). We propose a method of directly estimating the financial incentives for adopting conservation tillage and distinguish...

In a static setting, willingness to pay for an environmental improvement is equal to compensating variation. However, in a dynamic setting characterized by uncertainty, irreversibility, and the potential for learning, willingness to pay may also contain an option value. In this paper, we incorporate the dynamic nature of the value formulation proce...

In this paper, we examine command-and-control (CAC) policies and market-based instruments (MBI) in the context of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). The CRP, an MBI in the form of subsidies, is by far the largest agro-environmental policy implemented to date. We compare the environmental performance of the CRP as implemented to a few counterfa...

We study the optimal emission standards under uncertain pollution damages and transaction costs associated with policy changes in a dynamic setting. We consider three alternative forms of transactions costs and show that they can lead to different kinds of delays of policy changes or smaller scales of these changes. Thus, policy persistence can be...

We develop a dynamic model to investigate the optimal time paths of carbon emissions, sequestration, and the carbon stock. We show that carbon sinks should be utilized as early as possible, and carbon flow into sinks should last until the atmospheric carbon concentration is stabilized. We rule out any cyclical patterns of carbon sequestration and r...

The paper presents two simple models of dynamic consumer behavior, both taking into consideration the implications for welfare measurement when agents can delay transactions while obtaining additional information. One model studies the effect when a purchased good is non-perishable and can be consumed in the future, while the other model introduces...

We propose a new explanation for the WTP/WTA disparity in experiments and surveys. Uncertainty, irreversibility and limited learning opportunities can generate commitment costs, driving a wedge between WTP and WTA. We present experimental evidence that supports our hypothesis.