Three Essays in Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics

This dissertation is composed of three essays. The purpose of the first essay is to investigate the effect that higher temperatures have on the size of wildfires in the western United States controlling for suppression effort, precipitation, and other factors. Using data for 466 wildfires that occurred on U.S. Forest Service land between 2003 and 2007, I find that an increase in temperature of 1°C is associated with a 12% increase in wildfire size, holding all other factors constant. Given that current climate models predict temperatures to rise by 1.6 to 6.3°C, this estimate suggests mean wildfire size could increase by 20% to 79%. Off-setting this increase in wildfire size would require an increase in suppression expenditures of at least 16% to 63%. For the average wildfire, this would translate into an increase in suppression expenditures of between ;The purpose of the second essay is to investigate whether weed mobility has created a tragedy of the commons problem for soybean growers that hastened the emergence of glyphosate-resistant weeds. To determine whether this was the case, I derive a set of testable predictions from a simple game theoretic model of herbicide applications. Specifically, the model predicts that weed mobility will lead glyphosate application rates to increase as the number of neighbors surrounding a grower increases. I test this hypothesis using data for over 2,000 soybean growers collected during the 2006 Agricultural Resource Management Survey. I do not find evidence that the emergence of glyphosate resistance was the result of a national "tragedy of the commons" problem. Instead, my results suggest that strategic externalities only dominated other external factors in areas that are densely populated by soybean growers.;The purpose of the third essay is to investigate how growers respond to declines in herbicide susceptibility. I investigate this question using a panel of state-level glyphosate application data for cotton and soybean growers in the United States from 1996 to 2002. My results indicate that growers responded to declines in glyphosate susceptibility during this period by decreasing their use of glyphosate.