Research

Publications

Do farmers need to be paid to grow milkweed for monarchs or will they volunteer if it is easy enough?

(Co-authored with Terrance M. Hurley)

Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy (Published in 2022)

Working Papers

Valuing Monitoring Networks for New Pathogens: The Case of Soybean Rust in the United States [link]

(Co-authored with Frances R. Homans, Robert G. Haight and Terrance M. Hurley)

Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Revise and Resubmit

Measuring Intrinsic Motivation and Its Impact on Stated Preference: An Evidence from Monarch Conservation (Job Market Paper) [link]

I estimate intrinsic motivation of farmers' and study how it affects their willingness to participate in hypothetical monarch habitat restoration program using a survey of Midwestern farmers. Farmers' intrinsic motivation is approximated based on their conservation history using three different data reduction techniques. The results suggest that high intrinsic motivation cause greater willingness to participate in monarch conservation program. Additionally, it impacts the elasticity of participation with respect to conservation payments. Farmers with low intrinsic motivation should be paid enough or not at all to enhance their participation rate. Conversely, the highly motivated farmers have relatively inelastic participation. They are neither driven away by low payment rates nor lured into the program as conservation payment rises. One of the psychological mechanisms which can result in an inelastic supply of conservation activity for a highly motivated farmer is her low reputation concern. Based on the theoretical model of Benabou & Tirole (2006), I replicate my findings for both high and low intrinsically motivated farmers under the parametric assumption of low and high reputation concerns respectively.

Will Farmers Adopt Remote Sensing for Soybean Aphid Management? An Economic Perspective. [link]

(with Terrance M. Hurley)

This study examines the economic suitability of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for scouting soybean aphids based on a plant-level spatiotemporal bioeconomic model of infestation. We find that UAV based scouting, although imprecise, generates optimal profit equivalent to manual scouting. But its greater tendency to detect false positives relative to manual scouting can also trigger frequent unnecessary treatments and dramatically reduce farmers' profits. Yet, UAV's commercial viability depends more on reducing its operating cost than improving its precision, once it has a tally threshold of 250 soybean aphids per plant.