Agriculture is vulnerable to both natural and human-made changes. In the past few decades, changes in climate and energy policy have transformed U.S. agricultural production. From the perspective of economics, I am interested in the impacts of climate change and energy policy on agriculture, which are intensively investigated in my dissertation essays. In my first essay, I measure the impacts of climate change and adaptation on U.S. agriculture. Climate impact assessment models that ignore adaptation and technological change may overestimate the damage or underestimate the benefits from climate change. To address this issue, I investigate the impacts of climate change on farmland value accounting for adaptation, such as land-use change and technological change. My joint structural econometric model of farmland value and crop choices captures the complex interactions between crop prices, crop biological and physiological attributes (e.g., stomata density and root depth) that are correlated with crop stress resistance, and soil and climate characteristics. Thus, my model also allows me to measure the economic values of a series of adaptation strategies and quantify the heterogeneous impacts of climate change due to different initial conditions. My research has far-reaching applications for the agricultural industry, university extensions, and government agencies in guiding crop research and development, identifying vulnerable regions, and prioritizing funding allocation in adaptation to climate change.In my second essay, I determine the land-use change induced by the demand for bioenergy crops. Although deforestation is a concern for biomass promotion, empirical evidence is widely lacking. In this paper, I empirically estimate land-use changes associated with an emerging biomass market and a newly implemented biomass subsidy. The opening of a large-scale biomass processing plant in Missouri and the subsequent Biomass Crop Assistance Program shift the local demand for bioenergy crops and create heterogeneous supply incentives for farmers near to versus far away from the plant. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I find that the plant opening slightly induces land switching from forest to food crops, while the BCAP subsidy program not only significantly induces bioenergy crop supply, but also discourages deforestation, illustrating the environmental gains from the policy.Collectively, my dissertation provides guidance to policy makers that hope to promote sustainable agriculture in a rapidly changing environment.
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