2019-2020 Rusty Dame Awarded Best Second Year Paper
In 2019-2020, the best Second Year Paper award goes to Rusty Dame for his paper “The Impact on Welfare Estimates from the Inclusion of Multi-Day Trips Using a Three-Level Nested Logit Model.”
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2018 – 2019 Best Second Year Paper Award winner and honorable mention.
Kelsey Johnson's award winning paper, "Climate Change Adaptation in Forestry: Changing Forest Landscapes in the Southeast United States," uses a discrete choice econometric framework to estimate the effects of climate variables on the replanting decisions of forest landowners in the Eastern U.S. The paper finds evidence that under current climate predictions, the probability of planting loblolly/shortleaf pine forests will increase while the probability of replanting oak/hickory forests decreases.
Nathaniel Trull's honorable mention winning paper, "Water Rights, Production Choices, and Welfare Impacts of Alternative Policy Scenarios," uses a constrained optimization framework to show the welfare implications of the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation, which has dictated the consumption of water for agricultural production in the Western United States for over 100 years, against those of a competitive market, water conservation policy, and a water pricing policy. The research finds that there are welfare gains from moving to a “market” structure from appropriative water rights.
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2017 – 2018 Best Second Year Paper Award winner and honorable mention.
David Rossi's award winning paper, “The Influence of Risk Attitudes on Suppression’s Budget Share under a Fragmented Wildfire Budgeting Policy," derives the conditions under which the risk attitudes of incident managers can affect the socially efficient allocation of a wildfire management budget. It is shown that multiple types of risk attitudes separately influence an organization's demand behavior and increase the percentage of its budget devoted to wildfire suppression efforts.
Kedar Kulkarni's honorable mention winning paper, “Quantifying Climate Vulnerability of Agricultural Systems: A county-level and regional level analysis in the United States," focuses on quantifying vulnerability and risks of agricultural systems. The paper uses the partial and quantile moments based approaches to exploit a rich panel dataset from the U.S. Agriculture Census and estimate the effects of climatic variables on the mean and high-order moments at the county and regional level.
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2016 – 2017 Best Second Year Paper Award winner and honorable mention.
Best Second Year Paper for 2016-17: “Assessing Effects of Federal Crop Insurance Supply on Acreage and Yield of Specialty Crops” by Jian Shi. Jian’s paper examines crop insurance in the context of specialty crops, which are a major source of farm income on the U.S. West Coast. The paper provides a comprehensive treatment of moral hazard and adverse selection and sets up an endogenous switching regression model to simultaneously estimate the federal crop insurance supply equation and the acreage and yield response equations. Jian develops an econometric method that expands the switching regression model to estimate the model. The results suggest that federal crop insurance encourages producers of all selected crops to expand harvested acreage and also increases per acre yield of certain crops.
Honorable Mention for 2016-17: “The Determinants of Coastal Armoring: Estimating influential drivers of parcel-level riprap installation” by Jason Beasley. Jason’s paper examines parcel-level decisions to mitigate coastal erosion. He carries out a spatially explicit empirical analysis of the influential determinants of a landowner’s decision to install beachfront protective structures for all parcels along the Oregon coast. Econometric results confirm the presence of strong spatial dependencies for the installation decision. This result provides some evidence of the potential “domino” installation effect resulting from a neighboring installation. The results also quantify the marginal effects of installation with changes in erosion rates, elevation, and development offset among other key indicator variables.