We examine how the system of “federalism, Chinese style” functions in the context of land allocation. China’s land laws give provision of land a central role in local officials’ growth promotion strategies. Requisitions of farmland by local authorities have engendered significant rural...

This paper analyzes the impact of Public Works (PW) from the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) in the agricultural regions of Ethiopia. In particular, based on a household model with two inputs, I explore the eects of the program on capital and labor decisions using the Ethiopian Rural...

Small communities sometimes increase their local sales tax rate in order to maintain or expand public services. The question addressed here is what is the net effect of changing sales tax rates on revenues from sales taxes? Using both semiparametric and nonparametric regression, we find retail...

This study re-examines household valuation of local parks to assess the value afforded to specific amenities contained within parks and how those amenities change over time. A large body existing literature studying local parks has found single family residential homeowners are surprisingly...

Economists broadly recognize that the U.S. rural economy is no longer a farm economy, yet policy makers often justify support for agriculture by stressing the sector’s importance to the rural economy. We use the historically high crop prices in the late 2000s to estimate the marginal effect of...

This paper provides evidence of the eect of agricultural diversication and commercialization on the health of preschool children. We specically look at the impact of diversication and commercialization on stunting, wasting and underweight by using a nationally representative sample of households...

This paper adds to the recent literature on state-level incentive programs by evaluating the Quality Jobs Program in Oklahoma, which provides cash payments to businesses relocating to or expanding in the state. 70 communities across the state had a business that received QJ funding between 1994...

Spatial dependence is an important factor in regional economic growth analysis, especially in terms of population, employment, and per capita income. This paper employs spatial econometric techniques and U.S. Census Bureau county-level data for the period of 1980-2010 to identify and estimate...

As of fall 2012, school food services have needed to provide vegetables in greater quantities and diversity to fulfill new USDA requirements for the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and School Breakfast Program (SBP). This paper summarizes the results of a set of experiments conducted in...