Estimating Agricultural Pollution Abatement Costs at the Plot Level Using Experimental Data: A Maximum Entropy Approach

摘要

This paper uses a directional output distance function to estimate a multi-output production frontier for a sample of experimental plots grown for the Sustainable Agriculture Farming Systems project at the University of California, Davis. Cross-sectional technical efficiency indices are estimated that take into account two proxies for undesirable output: number of trips across a field as a proxy for air pollution and/ or soil erosion, and pints of pesticides applied to account for potential leachingand/or health risks. Shadow price estimates based on marginal rates of transformation ranged from 8 dollar - 21 dollar for trips, while shadow prices for pints of pesticides averaged 23 dollar - 37dollar.