Economics Commons^™

Valuation Of Soil Health Ecosystem Services. Vermont Payment For Ecosystem Services Technical Research Report #5, Benjamin Timothy Dube, Alissa C. White, Taylor H. Ricketts, Heather M. Darby

UVM Extension Faculty Publications

In this report, we present estimates for ecosystem services from soil health using two approaches for four different services. One approach generates estimates based on soil-health practices, and the other approach is based on improvements in soil-health indicators. For soil- health practices, such as adopting best-management practices on annual corn, we utilize a set of off-the shelf empirical models widely used to estimate ecological functions on farm landscapes. For soil-health indicators, we make estimates by linking these tools with soil data and statistical models describing how soil-health parameters influence the interaction of soils with water and their environment. We provide …

Farm Benchmarking: The Application Of Business, Conservation And Labor Indicators, Mark Cannella, Sara Ziegler,, Qingbin Wang, Mary Peabody, Thomas Leahey, Heather M. Darby

USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Center

Farm benchmarking programs will move Vermont’s food system towards important sustainability outcomes by establishing enhanced monitoring of priority indicators and facilitating the adoption of best practices. Farmers, researchers, policy agencies and development professionals agree there is a lack of regular and consistent data available to guide private and public initiatives. This paper identifies and contextualizes over forty priority indicators capable of measuring business performance, conservation, farm labor and community development.

Benchmarking methods need to be adapted to better represent the diversity of enterprises present in Vermont’s agricultural portfolio. The integration of University Extension objectives with food systems research priorities can …

Policy And Economic Variables Influencing Adoption Of Sustainable Electrification In Rural Sub-Saharan Africa, Payne William Morgan

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Limited access to electricity remains a primary constraint to economic growth and the improvement of livelihoods throughout sub-Saharan Africa. In rural areas, electricity access is especially sparse. The reasons for the scarcity of electricity supply in the region are well documented, with low population density, limited household incomes, and poor regulatory institutions compounding to often make the investment of expanding electricity access result in poor or risky economic returns. However, the declining cost of solar PV and mandates for clean energy development throughout the region have created new channels for bringing electricity supply in potentially more cost-effective ways.Despite these macro …

Essays On Modeling And Analysis Of Dynamic Sociotechnical Systems, David Rushing Dewhurst

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

A sociotechnical system is a collection of humans and algorithms that interact under the partial supervision of a decentralized controller. These systems often display in- tricate dynamics and can be characterized by their unique emergent behavior. In this work, we describe, analyze, and model aspects of three distinct classes of sociotech- nical systems: financial markets, social media platforms, and elections. Though our work is diverse in subject matter content, it is unified though the study of evolution- and adaptation-driven change in social systems and the development of methods used to infer this change.

We first analyze evolutionary financial market microstructure …

From Tap To Table: Consumer Values, Producer Attitudes, And Vermont Maple Syrup In A Dynamic Landscape, Aidan Conor Mccracken

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Harvesting the sap of maple trees [Acer saccharum] for use in the production of syrups and sugars has a storied history stretching back to the pre-Columbian practices of North America’s indigenous peoples. Since its adaptation by European settlers in the late seventeenth century and into the present day, the production of maple syrup has become especially integral to the livelihoods and cultural identities of farmers in Vermont. While oftentimes esteemed as a timeless agrarian tradition, market forces and environmental changes have led maple syrup producers (or sugarmakers) to adopt new production practices that scarcely resemble the taps, buckets, and draft …

Some Results On A Class Of Functional Optimization Problems, David Rushing Dewhurst

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

We first describe a general class of optimization problems that describe many natu- ral, economic, and statistical phenomena. After noting the existence of a conserved quantity in a transformed coordinate system, we outline several instances of these problems in statistical physics, facility allocation, and machine learning. A dynamic description and statement of a partial inverse problem follow. When attempting to optimize the state of a system governed by the generalized equipartitioning princi- ple, it is vital to understand the nature of the governing probability distribution. We show that optimiziation for the incorrect probability distribution can have catas- trophic results, e.g., …

Market Efficiency In U.S. Stock Markets: A Study Of The Dow 30 And The S&P 30, Colin Michael Van Oort

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The U.S. National Market System (NMS), the largest marketplace in the world for securities and exchange traded funds, suffers from geographic market fragmentation which leads to reduced market efficiency.

Communication lines transmit price updates and other information between geographically isolated exchanges at varying speeds, bounded above by the speed of light.

Market participants have access to federally mandated information provided by the Securities Information Processor (SIP) and privately offered information provided by the exchanges, often called direct feeds.

These feeds are quantitatively and qualitatively distinct, with the direct feeds tending to provide more information at a faster rate than the …

Shaping Policy In The Anthropocene: Gender Justice As A Social, Economic And Ecological Challenge, Phoebe Spencer

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Environmental pressures such as natural disasters, resource scarcity, and conflict related to climate change have emphasized the importance of considering social justice within its ecological context. Gender inequality is one type of injustice that has traditionally been addressed as a social matter, yet gendered divisions in bargaining power, mobility, and access to resources are exacerbated by environmental instability. One barrier to gender equity in the face of a changing climate is the mainstream economic paradigm, which promotes growth and individualism, often at the cost of environmental and social wellbeing. The issue of gender inequality in the Anthropocene, the proposed geological …

Designing For Economic Success: A 50-State Analysis Of The Genuine Progress Indicator, Mairi-Jane Venesky Fox

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The use of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the primary measure of economic progress has arguably led to unintended consequences of environmental degradation and socially skewed outcomes. The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) was designed to reveal the trade offs associated with conventional economic growth and to assess the broader impact of economic benefits and costs on sustainable human welfare. Although originally designed for use at the national scale, an interest has developed in the United States in a state-level uptake of the GPI to inform and guide policy. However, questions exist about the quality and legitimacy of the GPI as …

Early Adoption Dynamics Of Private Sustainability Governance Initiatives: A Case Study Of The Marine Cultured-Pearl Industry, Julie Nash

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

We are witnessing a time of unprecedented human impact on the natural environment. Coral reefs, one of the most biologically diverse and productive ecosystems, are at the forefront of enduring these human impacts. Despite widespread recognition of coral reef degradation, counter measures have not reached a scale to offset the threat. The magnitude of this and other environmental issues call for a deeper understanding of the role the private sector can play in sustainable development.

In response to environmental pressures and the shortcomings of global-scale governance, private sustainability governance initiatives have developed. In the last decade, these initiatives have flourished, …

An Exploratory Statistical Analysis Of Nasdaq Provided Trade Data, Michael Foley

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Since Benoit Mandelbrot's discovery of the fractal nature of financial price series, the quantitative analysis of financial markets has been an area of increasing interest for scientists, traders, and regulators. Further, major technological advances over this time have facilitated not only financial innovations, but also the computational ability to analyze and model markets.

The stylized facts are qualitative statistical signatures of financial market data that hold true across different stocks and over many different timescales. In pursuit of a mechanistic understanding of markets, we look to accurately quantify such statistics. With this quantification, we can test computational market models against …