• Impact of the Reclamation Act on Agricultural Development and Population Dynamics in the Western United States (joint with Mani Rouhi Rad, Rodolfo M. Nayga Jr., Aaron Hrozencik, and Gabriela Perez-Quesada), revise-and-resubmit at American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

This study examines the long-term effects of United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) dams on agricultural productivity and population growth in the Western U.S., first assessing the overall impact of dams and then evaluating the role of canal infrastructure. Using a staggered Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach, we compare downstream counties to upstream counties to estimate the effects of USBR dams, and then assess whether these effects differ between downstream counties with and without canals. Our findings show that USBR dams led to substantial increases in irrigated farmland, water-intensive crop acreage (e.g., corn and wheat), the value of agricultural land, population, and crop sales in downstream counties relative to upstream counties. These effects were significantly larger in downstream counties with canal infrastructure, while downstream counties without canals saw little or no improvement. The effects are also larger for dams built before the 1930s mainly for irrigation. Robustness checks confirm that the results are not driven by proximity to dams alone and hold when using never-treated counties as the control group instead of not-yet-treated counties. Overall, the results underscore the critical role of complementary infrastructure in amplifying the returns to large-scale federal investments in water management, with broader implications for contemporary concern over water scarcity.

Presented at SAEA 2025, AERE Summer Conference 2025, Texas Water Day (poster),
Texas A&M AGEC Graduate Symposium (1st place), Texas A&M AGEC DEPAL Seminar

• Upstream Advantage: The Economic Value of Water Security Under Riparian Rights in Eastern U.S. Agriculture (joint with Mani Rouhi Rad)

Presented at AAEA 2025

• The Cost of Drought: Farm-Level Evidence on Adjustment and Adaptation in U.S. Agriculture

• The Nonlinear Impacts of Temperature and Precipitation on U.S. Farm Activities

• Kang, N., C. Sims, P. Armsworth, J. Mingie, G. Zhu, and SH. Cho. (2024) “Accounting for the upper limits in returns to conservation investments in risk diversification strategies.” Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 49(2), pp. 332–349.

• Cho, SH, N. Kang, and Lee, J., (2024). “Risk tolerance towards research and development investment: the role of firm size and technology intensity.” Applied Economics, pp.1-14.

• Cho, SH.., N. Kang, and Zhu, G. (2023) “Examining how risk diversification for conservation is influenced by the probability assigned to uncertainty scenarios.” Environmental Conservation, 50(4), pp. 220–229.

• Cho, SH., J. Mingie, N. Kang, G. Zhu, S. Upendram. “Understanding the differences between single- and multiobjective optimization for the conservation of multiple species.” Natural Resource Modeling (2023): 36(1), e12356.

• Kang, N., C. Sims, and SH. Cho. “Spatial and taxonomic diversification for conservation investment under uncertainty.” Environmental Conservation (2022): 1-8.