Owen Rask

The U.S. Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is often framed as a conservation initiative, yet it also functions as one of the largest agricultural transfer programs, paying farmers annual rents to retire land from production. These payments offer income stability but prohibit production on that land for a decade. Despite the program's scale, little is known about how farmers weigh this tradeoff or how risk preferences shape their decisions. This paper develops a dynamic land-allocation model to study that decision. Each year, farmers choose how much land to allocate between crop production, which faces stochastic prices and yields, and the CRP with a two-year lock-in. Calibrating the model to county-level Iowa corn-grain producers reveals that even risk-neutral farmers allocate a substantial share (72% of the limit) to the CRP, and that risk aversion amplifies participation, though with pronounced spatial heterogeneity. The results suggest that uniform acreage caps are misaligned with local risk conditions and heterogeneous preferences, limiting the program's ability to act as effective income insurance.

This paper analyzes multigenerational trends in U.S. socioeconomic mobility using NLSY79 and NLSY97 data, with a focus on maternal role models. First, relative mobility results are sensitive to how we proxy for lifetime income; however, absolute upward mobility has risen by 2–4 ranks since the 1960s. Black Americans are the only group whose mobility has declined. Second, the mother's employment role model effect on daughters' mobility strengthens across generations and is robust across income definitions. An employed mother increases her daughter's lifetime employment likelihood by 4–6 percentage points, driven by black and white women. However, in the NLSY97 cohort, it is linked to a nearly three-rank decline in daughters' upward mobility.