Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Coatney, Kalyn T.

Committee Member

Chaudhry, Anita M.

Committee Member

Barnes, James N.

Date of Degree

5-4-2018

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Agricultural Economics

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.)

College

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

Department

Department of Agricultural Economics

Abstract

Due to increased adoption of irrigation and advancements in technology, producers in the Mississippi Delta have been unsustainably depleting the water stocks in the Mississippi River Valley Alluvial Aquifer (MRVAA). This research investigates the impacts of various regulatory threats uniformly applied to heterogeneously located producers to avert further overexploitation of the MRVAA. If a regulatory threat successfully incentivizes reduction of producers’ extraction rates, costly implementation of a binding limited-use regulation could be avoided. Laboratory experiments incorporating the major characteristics of the MRVAA were conducted to test two threatened uniform policies, limited-use and moratorium. The main finding of the research is that even with the threat of a moratorium, the regulatory trigger point was too lax to result in significantly slowing over exploitation of the water resource.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/16721

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