Three Essays on the Economics of Climate Change and Productivity, Food Supply, and Land Resource Conservation

This dissertation addresses food security problem from three alternative perspectives. The first essay analyzes the total factor productivity and climatic effects on milk production in Wisconsin dairy farms. This essay employs a recent developed stochastic production frontier method to quantify the impacts of seasonal factors and longer-term adaptive effects on output, which is a novel contribution to the literature. What is more, based on the results from generalized true random effects model, this essay employs a total factor productivity index and its six components to evaluate the competitiveness between farms and to explore strategies to increase productivity for milk production. The second essay identifies the barriers for buyers and non-buyers in the local food market. Using a multiviate probit model to capture the latent heterogeneity between consumers, the second essay contributes to the literature with a comprehensive analysis about consumers’ perception of price, quality, availability, and other barriers in local food market. The third essay extend a standard stated preference method to incorporate both land parcel attributes and cultural ecosystem services into a utility function to identify individuals’ preference. The third essay makes methodological contributions to develop a production index for perceived services and to demonstrate respondents’ choices are influenced by perceived services. These three essays contribute to fill the gap between climate change and food security problem in literature