Cattle producers in the Fescue Belt predominantly rely on cool-season grass (CSG) pastures. Supplementing CSGs with warm-season grasses (WSG) can provide economic and environmental benefits. We elicit Tennessee cattle producer willingness-to-adopt WSG using data from a hypothetical choice experiment that offered a monetary incentive to establish WSG pasture. A novel double-hurdle regression with Student-t errors was estimated using a Bayesian Hamiltonian Monte Carlo procedure. About 66% of participants were willing to convert 14%-21% of their pasture acres to WSG depending on the incentive amount. A $95/acre incentive is estimated to convert 7,631 acres to WSG, costing $0.77 million.

The Community Rating System (CRS) was established to encourage community to voluntarily conduct higher standard floodplain management. Participating communities are rewarded with flood insurance discounts based on CRS points earned through CRS eligible activities. This paper examines an overlooked question by previous research - whether there is spillover effect of the CRS program regarding flood damage reduction, as well as the potential mechanism of this spillover effect. Results indicate that there is a short-term spillover effect. For non-CRS communities, having a CRS neighbor leads to about $0.5 million reduction in annual flood damage a few years after the treatment. This impact is possibly because of community’s learning from their CRS neighbors by investing more on flood risk mitigation activities.

CRS incentivizes investments in risk reduction above NFIP standards using insurance premium discounts. These discounts are subsidized by increasing premiums in non-CRS communities. We examine the distributional impact of this cross-subsidization process. We find that redistribution does occur, but the gains and losses are not economically large with 95% of households gaining or losing no more than 0.3% of their income. We also find that the strongest predictor of gains is flood risk. Thus, CRS appears to reduce the cost of living in the riskier communities, a result that has clear policy implications if it induces sorting into riskier locations.

Hedonic model has been widely used in research that examine the impact of flood risk on property price, which further reflect how households form and update their belief of flood risk. This paper examines a question that have been overlooked by previous studies - What’s the impact of flood risk on housing supply. Considering that the composition of houses on the market before and after hurricane are usually not the same, we are also interested how does change in housing supply affect hedonic price model results. We use housing transaction records in Harris County, Texas right before and after the Hurricane Harvey and estimate both Difference-in-Difference and duration model. We find that houses in 100-year flood zone are sold faster than those outside during a short-term after Hurricane Harvey. We also find that control for housing supply in hedonic price model may lead to different results.