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At the turn of the century, irrigators in San Luis Valley (SLV), Colorado confronted a reality of precipitously dropping water levels of their shared groundwater resource stemming from their collective overextraction. Rather than continuing with business as usual—risking further declines and potential state intervention—they decided to self-organize and agreed to adopt a pumping fee, substantially increasing the cost of water—one of their key agricultural inputs. This innovative approach to conservation departs from those commonly championed by many groundwater stakeholders, who tend to favor conservation policies that decrease—not increase—costs, such as subsidizing more efficient irrigation technology or paying farmers to fallow their land. Despite few empirical examples of the introduction of a pumping fee, there are sound economic reasons to consider this approach. In this article, we review the adoption of this home-made policy, discussing the process and reasoning behind the stakeholders’ choices, the economic theory that supports it, and some of the agricultural, hydrological, and social outcomes that have resulted from it. The case study illuminates the potential benefits of a groundwater fee but also highlights that policy choices are multifaceted and what works in one scenario does not imply it is a panacea. The article concludes with a discussion of a recent and surprising policy move: SLV farmers have decided to increase the primary groundwater pumping fee exponentially to $500 per acre-foot (10 times the original fee in 2009). We discuss how this new policy represents a shift from a Pigouvian tax structure to what resembles more of a cap-and-trade system. While the results of this latest policy innovation are still unknown, the eventual results promise to be instructive not only to SLV but also to other areas facing similar water scarcity issues. 

Abstract Groundwater scarcity poses threats to communities across the globe, and effectively managing those challenges requires designing policy that achieves institutional fit. Collective action is well-suited to match rules with local context, and multiple pathways exist for communities to achieve reductions in groundwater use. To better understand how local conditions influence rule design, we examine two groundwater-reliant communities in the Western US that engaged in collective-action to arrive at distinct groundwater management rules. We consider: what drove stakeholders in Northwestern Kansas (NWKS) and San Luis Valley, Colorado (SLV) to adopt local groundwater policies, and why were different management pathways chosen? Further, why is more heterogeneity observed between local management organizations in SLV as compared to NWKS? To investigate these questions, we employ grounded theory to interpret the rules in reference to local hydro-agro-economic statistics and interviews with stakeholders (n= 19) in each region selected by expert sampling. We find that the additional goals of groundwater rules in SLV, partially driven by key contrasts in the resource system compared to NWKS, and higher resource productivity in SLV, creates both the need for and efficacy of a price-centered policy. Furthermore, variation in the resource systems and associated farm characteristics between subdistricts drives higher heterogeneity in rule design between local management districts in SLV compared to NWKS. More generally, we find the local flexibility afforded through the collective-action process as critical, even if it were to arrive at alternative, non-economic based incentives. 

Farmers in humid states of US, traditionally reliant on rainfall, have more than tripled irrigation since 1978. We examine this trend in Illinois where there has been a nearly threefold increase in center pivot irrigation system (CPIS) installations since 1988. Specifically, we analyze where and when CPIS installations occur and their benefits in terms of crop yield, irrigated acreage, crop selection, and changes to drought-related insurance payouts. To do so, we create a novel data set derived from a deep learning model capable of automatically identifying the location of CPIS during drought years. The results indicate CPIS installations are significantly more common over alluvial aquifers after droughts. Some evidence supports CPIS leads to corn appearing more often in the corn-soy crop rotation. Counties with a higher presence of CPIS do not have higher average crop yields. However, in drought years CPIS presence does have a significant positive effect on corn yield and a significant negative effect on indemnity payments for both soybeans and corn. The results provide insights into an emerging trend of irrigation in humid regions, raising potential policy considerations for crop insurance and signaling a potential need to address water rights as demand increases. 

Where an individual grows up has large implications for their long-term economic outcomes, including earnings and intergenerational mobility. Even within the United States, the “causal effect of place” varies greatly and cannot be fully explained by socioeconomic conditions. Across different nations, variation in growth and mobility have been linked to more individualistic cultures. We assess how variation of historically driven individualism within the United States affects mobility. Areas in the United States that were isolated on the frontier for longer periods of time during the 19th century have a stronger culture of “rugged individualism” [S. Bazzi, M. Fiszbein, M. Gebresilasse, Econometrica 88, 2329–2368 (2020)]. We combine county-level measures of frontier experience with modern measures of the causal effect of place on mobility—the predicted percentage change in an individual’s earnings at age 26 y associated with “growing up” in a particular county [R. Chetty, N. Hendren, Q. J. Econ. 133, 1163–1228 (2018)]. Using commuting zone fixed effects and a suite of county-level controls to absorb regional variation in frontier experience and modern economic conditions, we find an additional decade of frontier experience results in 25% greater modern-day income mobility for children of parents in the 25th percentile of income and 14% for those born to parents in the 75th percentile. We use mediation analysis to present suggestive evidence that informal manifestations of “rugged individualism”—those embodied by the individuals themselves—are more strongly associated with upward mobility than formal policy or selective migration. 

Abstract. An intriguing and rare gravity wave event was recorded on the night of 25 April 2017 using a multiwavelength all-sky airglow imager over northernGermany. The airglow imaging observations at multiple altitudes in themesosphere and lower thermosphere region reveal that a prominent upward-propagating wave structure appeared in O(1S) and O2 airglowimages. However, the same wave structure was observed to be very faint in OH airglow images, despite OH being usually one of the brightest airglowemissions. In order to investigate this rare phenomenon, the altitudeprofile of the vertical wavenumber was derived based on colocated meteorradar wind-field and SABER temperature profiles close to the event location.The results indicate the presence of a thermal duct layer in the altituderange of 85–91 km in the southwest region of Kühlungsborn, Germany.Utilizing these instrumental data sets, we present evidence to show how aleaky duct layer partially inhibited the wave progression in the OH airglowemission layer. The coincidental appearance of this duct layer is responsible for the observed faint wave front in the OH airglow images compared O(1S) and O2 airglow images during the course of the night over northern Germany.