Pick up a copy of the 2011-2012 Yellowbook telephone directory for Ames/Boone/Nevada area.

You can pick up your copy of directory (1 per office) in 260 Heady Hall. Please recycle your old directory by placing it in one of the recycling boxes located on each floor near the blue recycling bin.

After the initial printing of the directories an error was noted in the ISU section and there is a white corrected pamphlet to go with your directory.

Bob Baur, chief global economist for the Principal Financial Group and department alumnus, was featured recently in an article in The Des Moines Register by Adam Belz. Read the article at: http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2011/11/07/reprint-farm...

Student seminars for the week of November 28 include the following:

Ag Economic Workshop with Adriana Valcu, Monday, November 28, 4:10 to 5:30 PM, 368A Heady Hall.  "A practiced-based approach for controlling agricultural non point source water pollution: from theory to empirical assessment"

Abstract: The design of the efficient programs to address the nonpoint source (NPS) water quality from agriculture has been on the environmental economists’ agenda for a few decades. A large part of this research has focused on these programs within the context of an existing regulatory structure and the voluntary abatement from agriculture.

In this paper, we study the efficient design of agricultural water pollution when the regulator is allowed to impose regulations and standards on agricultural non point sources. Furthermore, we carefully address the implications of three types of fundamental difficulties faced by regulators: (1) imperfect information on the abatement costs of individual farms;(2) difficulties in observing pollution or abatement activities at the farm level; (3) and imperfect information on the water quality function. We propose and evaluate a simple but practical approach for regulating emissions from NPS within a watershed. Next, we consider a trading program where the initial allocations of abatement actions are assigned just as in the command and control approach, but producers can trade abatement actions conditional on meeting their assigned ambient target. The ease of the implementation and the efficiency of these two approaches are analyzed and compared under several scenarios. We begin by assuming that the regulator has perfect cost information, perfect information on the measurement of emissions leaving the field, and on the water quality production function as well. This provides the first- best case. Next, we relax the assumption that the regulator has perfect cost information on costs, while keeping the other assumptions. In the third case, we assume that for the ease of implementation of a trading system, the water quality production function is approximated as linear combinations of known field level emission reductions. For the last case, but of the most interest, we propose a point system to approximate the reductions associated with abatement at the field scale.

Our analysis considers the trade offs between two types of inefficiencies: the inefficiency of achieving water quality at a higher cost vs the inefficiency of not achieving the water quality goal. The magnitude of these inefficiencies is an empirical question at which we attempt to give an empirical assessment for a typical watershed.

International Economics Workshop/Econ 693 Presentation with Jingbo Cui, Wednesday, November 30, 3:40 to 5:00 PM.
"Are Exporters More Environmentally Friendly than Non-Exporters? Evidence from U.S. Manufacturing Facility Level Air Pollution Data,"

Abstract: This paper studies the theoretical and empirical relationship between export status and environmental performance at the firm level. To guide the empirical work, I introduce environmental pollution and technology adoption into a trade model with heterogeneous firms. The model predicts that a productive firm is more likely to adopt a clean technology and choose to export. Using facility-level air emission data in the U.S. manufacturing industry, an empirical test of the model reveals that: (1) facility productivity, measured by total factor productivity, is inversely related to emission intensity; and (2) exporting facilities have lower emission intensity than non-exporting ones, statistical significance is high for Sulfur Dioxide (SO2), moderate for Ammonia (NH3) and Carbon Monoxide (CO), weak for Ozone (O3), and lacking for Total Suspended Particulates (TSPs). Additionally, the paper provides the estimates of the impact of environmental regulation, captured by the Clean Air Act Amendments, on facility emission intensity. The negative impact of CO nonattainment regulations on the relevant polluting facilities is documented, but there is little evidence for SO2, O3, and TSPs nonattainment designations