Groundwater-irrigated Agriculture

Here are the list of the projects that I am currently working on under Groundwater-irrigated Agriculture: Policy Impact Evaluation and Decision Making Analysis.

Research Project 1 Strategic groundwater use behavior (with Nathan Hendricks, Karina Schoengold)

Research Project 2 Well yield and its impacts on irrigation decisions: empirical investigation (with Mani Rouhi Rad)

Research Project 3 The impacts of crop insurance on irrigation behavior (with Paloch Suchato, Karina Schoengold, and Timothy Foster)

Mieno, Cory, and Lilyan (2018) has shown that Actual Production History (APH) plays a critical role in determining input use under major crop insurance products, such as Yield Protection, Revenue Protection which base their premium and indemnity payments on APH. It showed that agricultural producers may use more (not less!) risk-decreasing inputs under such insurance products. This project examines how those insurance products affect irrigation behavior using a stochastic dynamic programming approach in conjunction with yield distribution conditional on irrigation amount estimated by APSIM (a crop simulation model). Geographic focus of the study is Ogallala aquifer portion of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, and Texas.

Research Project 4 Efficient Design of Water Use Reduction Subsidy Program Design (with Zhengzheng Gao and Karina Schoengold)

In order to achieve a certain amount of reduction in resource (or any input) use, it is well established in economics that the most efficient outcome can be achieved via Pigouvian tax or tradable permit system. Yet, tax is typically subject to strong resistance and tradable permit system is often associated with high transaction costs. Consequently, policy makers often resort to other inefficient mechanisms in practice. One of such mechanisms is a buy out program to halt production activity altogether. For example, URNRD in Nebraska has bought irrigated land to reduce irrigation. The primary objective of this project is to show that an appropriately-designed subsidy for input use reduction can achieve the same amount of reduction in input use at a lower cost paid out by policy makers.

Research Project 5 The impacts of well moratorium on well drilling decisions (with Qianyu Zhang and Karina Schoengold)