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Demand for an Environmental Public Good in the Time of COVID-19: A Statewide Water Quality Referendum

George Parsons, Laura Paul, and Kent Messer

Due to COVID-19, many households face hardship — unemployment, an uncertain economic future, forced separation, and more. At the same time, the number of people participated in outdoor recreation is reported to be on the rise, as it was one of the few activities still permitted. How these experiences affect the public’s willing to pay for environmental public goods is unknown. During the pandemic, we conducted a stated preference survey to value statewide water quality improvements in Delaware. While a majority of participants report experiencing hardship of some sort (economic, emotional, etc.), mean household WTP declined by only 7% post-COVID. Based on our results, legislation being debated at the time of the outbreak passes a benefit-cost test (and majority vote) either pre- or post-COVID.

Conditional and Unconditional Yield Gains from Drought-Tolerant Maize and the Economic Implications for Farmers in Southern and Eastern Africa

Laura Paul

Improved crop varieties, such as drought-tolerant (DT) maize, can mitigate crop failures and provide substantial improvements in yield level and variance. However, evidence of these benefits from farmers practicing rainfed agriculture is thin. This paper assesses the advantage of the DT trait using data from on-farm trials of DT maize and high-resolution precipitation data (10-day measurements at a 0.05° resolution) in four countries in southern Africa, over four years. While prior work has found DT maize to have up to twice the yields of comparison varieties in controlled settings, I find that on farms, yield only slightly exceeds that of other improved varieties of maize: DT has 7% higher yields on average, and 15% higher yields under moderate drought stress. Moreover, there is significant heterogeneity in returns from the DT maize technology with the lowest returns estimated for low-performing farms. The economic implications of these reduced yield advantages for some farmers are very small net returns ($33 in a normal year, $100 in a year with mid season drought) relative to a comparison improved variety of maize.

Challenges in Recruiting U.S. Farmers for Policy-Relevant Economic Field Experiments

Collin Weigel, Laura Paul, Paul Ferraro, and Kent Messer

To develop evidence-based agricultural policies, researchers increasingly use insights from economic field experiments. These insights are often limited by the challenges of recruiting large and representative samples of farmers. To improve the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of farmer recruitment, researchers should apply the same experimental methods to the recruitment process that they apply to their main research questions. Here we experimentally evaluate ten recruiting strategies in two large-scale, high stakes experiments. We find that monetary incentives and reminders are effective, but costly. Costless strategies, such as prominently citing a well-known institution as the sponsor, had positive but small, effects on recruitment.

Bundling Stress Tolerant Seeds and Insurance for Resilient Small-scale Agriculture: Impacts and the Challenge of Learning about Technologies with Stochastic Benefits

Steve Boucher, Michael Carter, Jon Einar Flatnes, Travis Lybbert, Jonathan Malacarne, Paswel Marenya, and Laura Paul