Increasing Beach Recreation Benefits by Using Wetlands to Reduce Contamination

The public swimming beach at Maumee Bay State Park (MBSP) on Lake Erie is often posted for occurrences of unsafe levels of bacteria. The main source of bacteria derives from a drainage ditch that discharges near the beach. We have conducted a comprehensive study to determine the feasibility of using a constructed wetland to filter the ditch water, prior to its entry into Maumee Bay. As part of this study, we administered an on-site non-market valuation survey of beach visitors, in which observed and contingent trips to the beach were used to estimate the potential welfare benefits of the restored wetlands. The data were analyzed using three versions of the multivariate Poisson-lognormal (MPLN) model, a random effects count data model. We conclude version one, with flexible covariance structure and vehicle costs of $0.25 per mile, is the preferred version and use it to estimate an average annual willingness to pay (WTP) of$166 to construct wetlands and improve water quality. The aggregate annual benefit to an estimated 37,300 annual beach visitors is estimated as $6.19 million. The robustness of this estimate to a variety of alternative assumptions is examined.Count data model, Poisson lognormal, on-site sampling, recreation demand, wetland, simulated maximum likelihood, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Environmental Economics and Policy, Public Economics, Q51,

Are Tomato-Spotted Wilt Virus Management Tactics Good Enough?

Management of tomato-spotted wilt virus is complex and requires more than one treatment for near optimum results. We investigated tomato and pepper growers’ perception on the effectiveness of tactics using Bayesian Logistic regression. The perceived chance that each tactics will control the disease was about a coin toss.Tomato-spotted wilt virus, pest and disease management, Bayesian logistic regression, Agricultural and Food Policy, Crop Production/Industries, Farm Management, Food Security and Poverty, Production Economics, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Risk and Uncertainty,

Self-Protection from Weather Risk using Improved Maize Varieties or Off-Farm Income and the Propensity for Insurance

We investigate how self-protection from the adoption of Improved Maize Varieties (IMV) and off-farm income affects risk premiums for smallholder maize producers in Uganda. To unbundle these effects, we specify the cost of risk to explicitly capture four risk components - mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis. Using unique plot-level panel data for Uganda, we estimate and test moments of a flexible production function based on an expanded form of the Johnson SU family distribution and proceed to simulate the degree of responsiveness of risk premiums and welfare estimates to marginal changes in the share of land under IMV and off-farm income. Scenarios of joint adoption of IMV accompanied with low and high application of inorganic fertilizer, and the effect of off-farm income when there is high and low supply of farm labor are examined. Results show that the use of IMV and off-farm income substantially reduces risk premiums and the individual effect is much higher under low fertilizer application and high supply of farm labor, respectively. Thus implying that self-protection is likely to reduce the propensity for index insurance especially if its design fails to consider the reduction in downside risk