This paper is concerned with agri-environmental policy in Germany and focuses in particular on soil and water conservation. At first it discusses to what extent agriculture contributes to erosion and the pollution of surface waters and groundwater with nutrients and pesticides. Whereas erosion...

The economic literature on pest control exclusively assumes a non-negative marginal product of pesticides based on a monotonic non-decreasing function of damage abatement, which may bias pesticide productivity estimates. This paper proposes a specification that allows for a negative marginal...

We compute aggregate productivity of three categories of regions, classified by level of urbanization in the Netherlands, from firm-specific total factor productivity (TFP) measures. TFP measures are estimated by a semi-parametric algorithm, within 2-digit industries, covering agriculture,...