REYNAUD Arnaud

We identify factors involved in the decision of farmers to use marketing contracts (pool, storage and forward contracts), and we explicitly account for the hedging and price-enhancement components of this decision. Using panel corner solution models (Tobit and double-hurdle) to represent farmers' contracting decision using a sample of French cereal producers, we find that both the hedging and the price-enhancement motives are important factors driving marketing choices. When risk aversion or exposure to price risk rises, the price-enhancement motive becomes less influential. Farmers appear to be more reluctant to base their marketing decisions on their price expectations in that case.

No summary available.

The paper presents one of the first economic analyses of residents’ choice of different coastal erosion control measures in a developing country - Vietnam. Hoi An, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was selected given the frequency of coastal erosion events which have caused increasing damages to property, tourism activities and the livelihood of local people in an iconic tourist destination. We designed a discrete choice experiment based on responses from 399 households in order to estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) for differing coastal erosion control measures. Using the generalized multinomial logit model, empirical results yield five important findings. First, residents prefer wider, more public beaches having both trees and restaurants and are willing to accept visible structures such as groynes and stair revetment to prevent further erosion. Second, residents place a higher value on a beach that is protected by robust permanent structures. In particular, residents have the highest WTP for groynes. Third, there exists preference and scale heterogeneity across respondents which are driven by level of education, knowledge of the problem, and the stated level of choice certainty. Fourth, knowledge and experience of coastal erosion are shown to have a strong influence on the valuation residents place on the choice of protective structures. Finally, on average, a resident is willing to pay USD 1.7 per year for a coastal erosion management program that increases beach width by additional 50 meters, beach access by additional 25%, restaurants and trees on the beach and groynes as the erosion protection structure.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the pricing of water services delegated to private operators in France, using an econometric model describing both the supply and demand of drinking water. The production structure of municipal water utilities is represented by a Translog cost function, and the water demand function is specified taking into account domestic and industrial users. The Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) is used with panel data, on a sample of water utilities in the Bordeaux region, to jointly estimate the supply and demand functions. On the basis of the estimated technology and demand parameters, we simulate the prices according to the marginal cost rule (first-best pricing) and the variation of social surplus. It is shown that the optimal pricing scheme is first characterized by higher marginal prices and then by lower fixed charges. However, the shift to more efficient pricing does not have significant social welfare consequences.

Finding ways to save water in agriculture is a crucial issue. In Europe, agriculture is the largest user of water, accounting for more than 50% of total withdrawals. In large parts of Europe, water use for irrigation already exceeds rainfall. In southern and eastern European countries, drought and water scarcity are particularly acute, and climate change will only worsen this situation. While agronomists try to make crops less water-dependent, or to make water use more efficient by improving equipment and techniques, and economists suggest taxing or better pricing water use, in this project we have attempted to reduce farmers' water use by using psychological levers, or nudges, not involving monetary transfers. Encouragingly, the nudge we tested reduced the highest consumptions. Unfortunately, it also increased the lowest consumption, and therefore had a neutral effect overall. This result shows that we still need to refine the design of nudges to make them more effective in practice.

The work presented in this thesis is to combine, for the first time, the two types of literature concerning water quality monitoring networks, the literature on physical network optimization and the literature on the economic value of information for a predefined network. We seek to optimize the design of the monitoring network by maximizing the economic value of the information. We are mainly interested in the spatial aspect of the monitoring network, more precisely in the location of the monitoring stations. We call this method the economic optimization of the monitoring network. This means that the optimization of the monitoring network is not only based on physical or hydrological considerations, but also takes into account economic considerations. In this thesis, we investigate in particular the advantage of such economic optimization over traditional physical optimization.

In a global context of increasing water scarcity, reducing water use in the agricultural sector is one of the spearheads of sustainable agricultural and environmental policies. New technologies such as smart water meters are promising tools for addressing this issue, but their voluntary adoption by farmers has been limited. Conducting a discrete choice experiment with randomized treatments, we test two policy instruments designed to foster the voluntary adoption of smart water meters: a conditional subsidy and green nudges. The conditional subsidy is offered to farmers who adopt a smart meter only if the rate of adoption in their geographic area is sufficiently high (25%, 50% or 75%). In addition, we implement informational nudges by providing farmers specific messages regarding water scarcity and water management. With the responses of 1,272 French farmers, we show that both policy instruments are effective tools for fostering smart water meter adoption. Surprisingly, our results show that the willingness to pay for the conditional subsidy does not depend on the collective adoption threshold. We also demonstrate that farmers who receive an informational nudge are more likely to opt for a smart water meter. This result calls for a careful joint design of these two policy instruments.

In this paper, we compare the properties of two irrigation water pricing systems based on management systems employed by water management companies in France, the Compagnie d'Aménagement des Coteaux de Gascogne (CACG) on the one hand and the Compagnie (CAEDS) on the other. The modeling uses a coupling of an agronomic model of plant growth (STICS) with a model of optimization of farmers' behavior in an uncertain universe. On data from the Midi-Pyrénées region, we compare these pricing systems according to the criteria of water consumption, value of agricultural production, farmer's profit and manager's revenue. The study of the properties shows that the CAEDS pricing system is more adapted to cope with droughts and at the same time cover the manager's costs with higher revenues. The CACG pricing system has the advantage of allowing farmers to make a larger profit. But both can not only contribute to a better implementation of the European Water Framework Directive, but also open an interesting way to original pricing systems to facilitate the achievement of the objectives of the managers of irrigated areas.

No summary available.

Saltwater intrusion problems in coastal aquifers are now one of the main causes of deterioration in their water quality. These intrusions are most often the result of excessive withdrawals from sensitive areas of the freshwater aquifer. Seawater, which is denser, invades aquifers connected to the marine environment as soon as withdrawals are sufficiently intense to modify the hydrostatic balance. The purpose of this article is to identify the particular problems posed by the optimal management of this type of resource. To this end, the authors use a simplified model of the changes in the morphology of the freshwater table and, in particular, of the displacements of its interface with the saline water mass, in response to changes in withdrawal intensity. An increase in withdrawal intensity results in the boundary beyond which permanent withdrawals can be made inland being pushed further from the coast. This relationship between volumes withdrawn and the obligatory positioning of the withdrawal points generates a specific externality whose effects on the optimal use of the resource are analyzed. The tariff conditions that must be imposed on the concessionaire and the prices that must be charged to the users to decentralize the optimum are determined.

This study analyzes the structure of industrial water demand by estimating the derived water demand on a sample of industrial plants in southwestern France. Production technologies are represented by short-run variable cost functions, and are approximated by a flexible Translog form. Industrial water use is modeled in three components: the amount of water purchased from a water utility, the amount of autonomous source water and the amount of water used after pre-treatment. This paper includes in this framework the emissions of pollutants from the facilities, which are considered as joint products of the production process. Each of the three components is treated as a separate input, and all are estimated in a simultaneous system of equations. The model is estimated on a sample of 51 industrialists in Gironde between 1994 and 1996, with the SUR and Feasibles GLS procedures. The results of the estimations show that the industrialists are sensitive to the price of water as a factor of production. The elasticity of the price of mains water is estimated at -0.29, and varies from -0.10 to -0.79 depending on the industry considered. The price elasticity of "autonomous" water is not significant, and the price elasticity of pre-treated water is estimated at -1.42 at the average point of the sample, varying between -0.90 and 2.21 depending on the industry considered.

The authors develop an econometric method to estimate crop choices at a disaggregated level (district level), using more aggregated data (regional level). This disaggregation method requires two steps. In the first step the authors estimate a dynamic land use model at the regional level. In the second step, they disaggregate the results of the regional model using a maximum entropy (ME) method. This ME disaggregation method is applied to a sample of California data. The sample includes six districts located in the Central Valley and eight possible crops, namely: alfalfa, cotton, forage, grain, melons, tomatoes, vegetables, and subtropical crop. The disaggregation process reconstructs land use at the district level with an out-of-sample prediction error of 16%. This result shows that the microeconomic behavior inferred from the aggregated data with this disaggregation method appears to be consistent with observed behavior.

No summary available.

We test whether social comparison nudges can promote water-saving behaviour among farmers as a complement to traditional CAP measures. We conducted a randomised controlled trial among 200 farmers equipped with irrigation smart meters in South-West France. Treated farmers received weekly information on individual and group water consumption over four months. Our results rule out medium to large effect-sizes of the nudge. Moreover, they suggest that the nudge was effective at reducing the consumption of those who irrigate the most, although it appears to have reduced the proportion of those who do not consume water at all.

We conducted an artefactual field experiment in Vietnam to investigate whether and how experiencing a natural disaster affects individual attitudes toward risks. Using experimental and real household data, we show that households in villages affected by a flood in recent years exhibit more risk aversion, compared with individuals living in similar but unaffected villages. Interestingly, this result holds for the loss domain, but not the gain domain. In line with Prospect Theory, Vietnamese households distort probabilities. The distortion is related to aid received and social networks participation, but is unrelated to flood experience.

Improving water efficiency is a growing challenge for the Common Agricultural Policy. In this article, we test whether social comparison nudges can promote water-saving behavior among farmers. We report on a pilot Randomized Controlled Trial, in which information on individual and group water consumption were sent every week to farmers equipped with smartmeters. We do not detect an effect of nudges on average water consumption. We however find that the nudge decreases water consumption at the top of the distribution while it increases consumption at the bottom. This study highlights the potential of nudges as an agricultural policy tool.

Hidden costs limit the reduction of GHG emissions from agricultural production. Uncertainty is inherent to farmers' production decisions, and impacts them through various channels: beliefs, risk, information, ambiguity, are all barriers that can limit the diffusion of mitigation practices in the agricultural sector. In this thesis we first present a comprehensive literature review on agri-environmental measures and on the different useful approaches to uncertainty in microeconomics and agricultural economics. We then develop an adoption decision model showing that 3 hidden costs related to uncertainty can limit the adoption of new practices in a non-additive way and coexist (option value, risk premium, informational externalities), so that the regulator has to socialize them in a GHG emission reduction objective. Then, we adopt a land conversion model and derive an empirical strategy to estimate the impact of the volatility of grassland yields on the implied values of grasslands in the French forage mix. The multinomial logistic model is estimated by an instrumental approach using meteorological data. Finally, we conduct a survey on a sample of farmers in order to measure their attitudes towards risk and ambiguity (Multiple price list) and to estimate their impact on nitrogen fertilization decisions, in terms of total application and splitting.

We test whether social comparison nudges can promote water-saving behavior among farmers as a complement to traditional CAP measures. We conducted a Randomized Controlled Trial among 200 farmers equipped with irrigation smart meters in SouthWest France. Treated farmers received weekly information on individual and group water consumption over four months. Our results rule out medium to large effect-sizes of the nudge. They moreover suggest that the nudge was effective at reducing the consumption of those who irrigate the most, although it appears to have reduced the proportion of those who do not consume water at all.

The aim of this Special Issue is to gather evidence on the impact of price policies (PP) and non-price policies (NPP) in shaping residential water use in a context of increased water scarcity. Indeed, a large body of the empirical economic literature on residential water demand has been devoted to measuring the impact of PP (water price increases, use of block rate pricing or peak pricing, etc.). The consensus is that the residential water demand is inelastic with respect to water price, but not perfectly. Given the low water price elasticity, pricing schemes may not always be effective tools for modifying household water behaviors. This is puzzling since increasing the water price is still viewed by public authorities as the most direct economic tool for inducing water conservation behaviors. Additional evidence regarding the use of PP in shaping residential water use is then required. More recently, it has been argued that residential consumers may react to NPP, such as water conservation programs, education campaigns, or smart metering. NPP are based on the idea that residential water users can implement strategies that will result in water savings via changing their individual behaviors. Feedback information based on smart water metering is an example of approach used by some water utilities. There are still large gaps in the knowledge on the residential water demand, and in particular on the impact of PP and NPP on residential water use, household water affordability and water service performance. These topics are addressed in this Special Issue “Advances in the Economic Analysis of Residential Water Use”.

Improving water efficiency is a growing challenge for the Common Agricultural Policy. In this article, we test whether social comparison nudges can promote water-saving behavior among farmers. We report on a pilot Randomized Controlled Trial, in which information on individual and group water consumption were sent every week to farmers equipped with smartmeters. We do not detect an effect of nudges on average water consumption. We however find that the nudge decreases water consumption at the top of the distribution while it increases consumption at the bottom. This study highlights the potential of nudges as an agricultural policy tool.

Improving water efficiency is a growing challenge for the Common Agricultural Policy. In this article, we test whether social comparison nudges can promote water-saving behavior among farmers. We report on a pilot Randomized Controlled Trial, in which information on individual and group water consumption were sent every week to farmers equipped with smartmeters. We do not detect an effect of nudges on average water consumption. We however find that the nudge decreases water consumption at the top of the distribution while it increases consumption at the bottom. This study highlights the potential of nudges as an agricultural policy tool.

Despite the large literature focused on residential water use, our knowledge of the impact of individual metering on household water consumption remains limited. Our work aims to fill this gap by providing the first estimate of the residential water demand function in the Principality of Andorra, where collective and individual metering coexists. Using a panel dataset covering the years 2006 to 2015, we propose estimating a domestic water demand function for the municipality of Andorra La Vella (the capital of Andorra). Our estimates reveal a price elasticity of the residential water demand equal to -0.7. Facing a price increase of 10 percent, households will react in the short run by reducing their water consumption by 7 percent. Interestingly, the price elasticity is found to be significantly different in single-family units compared to multi-family units. This may suggest a significant impact of individual metering on domestic water consumption in Andorra.

No summary available.

More than half of the global river network is composed of intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams (IRES), which are expanding in response to climate change and increasing water demands. After years of obscurity, the science of IRES has bloomed recently and it is being recognised that IRES support a unique and high biodiversity, provide essential ecosystem services and are functionally part of river networks and groundwater systems. However, they still lack protective and adequate management, thereby jeopardizing water resources at the global scale. This Action brings together hydrologists, biogeochemists, ecologists, modellers, environmental economists, social researchers and stakeholders from 14 different countries to develop a research network for synthesising the fragmented, recent knowledge on IRES, improving our understanding of IRES and translating this into a science-based, sustainable management of river networks. Deliverables will be provided through i) research workshops synthesising and addressing key challenges in IRES science, supporting research exchange and educating young researchers, and ii) researcher-stakeholder workshops translating improved knowledge into tangible tools and guidelines for protecting IRES and raising awareness of their importance and value in societal and decision-maker spheres. This Action is organized within six Working Groups to address: (i) the occurrence, distribution and hydrological trends of IRES. (ii) the effects of flow alterations on IRES functions and services. (iii) the interaction of aquatic and terrestrial biogeochemical processes at catchment scale. (iv) the biomonitoring of the ecological status of IRES. (v) synergies in IRES research at the European scale, data assemblage and sharing. (vi) IRES management and advocacy training.

Ever since Ellsberg (1961), the distinction between risk, where agents assign well-defined probabilities to possible outcomes, and ambiguity, where agents do not, has been of particular interest. Using a carefully-designed field experiment, we elicit information about risk and ambiguity preferences among 197 French farmers and structurally estimate these preferences. e use cumulative prospect theory and a multiple-prior model in order to model risk and ambiguity preferences, respectively. We find that farmers are risk, ambiguity, and loss averse, and that probability distortion differs in gains vs. losses, as well as in risk vs. ambiguity. These findings can have important implications for policy design.

In France, one inhabitant out of four is exposed to floods. In this thesis, we are interested in the mechanisms of individual adaptation to these natural risks. More precisely, we examined the influence of the characteristics of individuals and their situations with respect to risks on their adaptation decisions. To this end, we conducted a quantitative survey of 331 people living in flood-prone areas in the departments of Aude and Var. The questionnaire used in this survey was developed from the literature and from the analysis of an exploratory survey by semi-structured interviews. According to our results, the perception of the threat related to floods and the perception of the severity of the flood experienced have a positive effect on adaptation intentions, as described in the Protection Motivation Theory adapted to the flood domain (Grothmann and Reusswig, 2006). Our results also suggest the existence of a negative feedback of the implementation of a prevention measure on the perception of the flood threat. This suggests that empirically observed relationships between perceptions and past adaptation decisions should be viewed with caution. Furthermore, our results show a positive relationship between indicators of flood frequency and severity and respondents' perceptions of these characteristics. Because these perceptions have a positive effect on intention to adapt, this means that those most likely to adapt are those exposed to the most severe and frequent floods in the study sample. We also examined the relationships between perceptions and attitudes in the areas of financial and flood risk and investigated the influence of these variables on individual adaptation. To do so, we used the psychometric subscale concerning financial risks of the DOSPERT scale (Weber et al., 2002; Blais and Weber, 2006) and developed a psychometric subscale based on the same model, but concerning flood risks. The latter presents satisfactory internal and external consistency. Analysis of the data collected using the financial and flood risk subscales suggests that these two types of risk tend to compete. Thus, the importance that individuals place on financial risks relative to flood risks appears to have a negative effect on adaptation intentions. As a result, preventive measures cannot be considered as forms of self-insurance, which only reduce the risk of financial losses. Thus, our results suggest that individual adaptation depends, among other things, on individuals' perceptions and attitudes regarding financial risks, flood risks, but also on their perceptions regarding the means of adaptation to floods. According to the social amplification theory of risk (Kasperson et al., 1988), perceptions and attitudes can be modified by direct or indirect experience of a risk. Our results support the hypothesis that having experienced a flood alters perceptions and attitudes not only in the area of flood risk, but also in the area of financial risk. To examine the influence of indirect flood experience on individual coping, we developed a theoretical model that describes the relationships among the components that should be considered when studying the diffusion of coping within a social network. In particular, this model takes into account social interactions.

This study presents the first meta-analysis on the economic value of ecosystem services delivered by lakes. A worldwide data set of 699 observations drawn from 133 studies combines information reported in primary studies with geospatial data. The meta-analysis explores antagonisms and synergies between ecosystem services. This is the first meta-analysis to incorporate simultaneously external geospatial data and ecosystem service interactions. We first show that it is possible to reliably predict the value of ecosystem services provided by lakes based on their physical and geographic characteristics. Second, we demonstrate that interactions between ecosystem services appear to be significant for explaining lake ecosystem service values. Third, we provide an estimation of the average value of ecosystem services provided by lakes: between 106 and 140 USD$2010 per respondent per year for non-hedonic price studies and between 169 and 403 USD$2010 per property per year for hedonic price studies. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Ever since Ellsberg (1961), the distinction between risk, where agents assign well-defined probabilities to possible outcomes, and ambiguity, where agents do not, has been of particular interest. Using a carefully-designed field experiment, we elicit information about risk and ambiguity preferences among 197 French farmers and structurally estimate these preferences. e use cumulative prospect theory and a multiple-prior model in order to model risk and ambiguity preferences, respectively. We find that farmers are risk, ambiguity, and loss averse, and that probability distortion differs in gains vs. losses, as well as in risk vs. ambiguity. These findings can have important implications for policy design.

Vietnam is one of the countries most affected by floods. Despite high exposure to this risk and repeated calls from international organizations, the penetration rate of flood insurance remains surprisingly low in Vietnam. We investigate if there is a demand for flood insurance by Vietnamese households using a choice experiment. We compute households’ willingness to pay (WTP) for various flood insurance programs and we identify the relationships between WTP and the different attributes of insurance schemes (type of risk covered, level of coverage, insurance provider, billing frequency, insurance premium). We first show that Vietnamese households exhibit a strong preference for the status quo option (no insurance). We do, however, document significant and positive WTP for some flood insurance policies, especially those covering health expenses. We show that household trust in institutions providing flood insurance policies may help understand the currently low adoption rate. Finally, we stress the high degree of heterogeneity in household preferences for flood insurance policies: past experience with flooding, individual risk preferences and subjective flood risk perception matter to understand WTP for flood insurance. These results call for a very careful design of flood insurance mechanisms in Vietnam, and more generally in developing countries subject to high risks of natural disasters.

A contingent valuation approach is used to estimate how households value different multipurpose infrastructures (conventional or green) for managing flood risk and water pollution. As a case study we consider the Gorla Maggiore water park located in the Lombardy Region, in Northern Italy. The park is a neo-ecosystem including an infrastructure to treat waste water and store excess rain water, built in 2011 on the shore of the Olona River in an area previously used for poplar plantation. This park is the first one of this type built in Italy. A novel aspect of our research is that it not only considers the values people hold for different water ecosystem services (pollution removal, recreative use, wildlife support, flood risk reduction), but also their preferences for how those outcomes are achieved (through conventional or green infrastructures). The results indicate that the type of infrastructure delivering the ecosystem services does have an impact on individuals’ preferences for freshwater ecosystem services. Households are willing to pay from 6.3 to 7.1 euros per year for a green infrastructure (compared to a conventional one), with a premium up to 16.5 euros for a surrounding made of a park. By considering the type of infrastructure within the choice model, we gain a richer understanding of the relationship between social welfare and freshwater ecosystem services.

We assess the impact of implementing the full cost recovery (FCR) principle for water services on European households. This assessment includes three dimensions. First, we measure how household water consumption reacts to the price change induced by implementing the FCR principle. Second, we provide a measure of the resulting household welfare losses. Third, we evaluate how household water affordability is impacted. This assessment which relies on a household water demand function approach has been conducted for 9 European countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain). For most of these countries, we show that implementing the FCR principle does not lead to substantial water affordability issues. Bulgaria (and to a lesser extend Estonia and France) is one exception since poor households (i.e. households belonging to the first income decile) have to devote more than 3% of their income for paying their water and wastewater bill under a FCR regime. The fact that water affordability may become an issue under FCR for some countries gives some ground for public authorities to develop specific policies targeted to poor households.

We provide the first estimate of a household water demand function in Serbia. The econometric model is estimated on a panel dataset made of the 25 Serbian districts (oblasts) covering years 2009 to 2012. Our estimates reveal a price elasticity of the Serbian household water demand varying between -0.2 and -0.9, depending on the model considered. We also demonstrate how the household water demand function can inform water policies in a prospective context. Using our estimates, we explore some possible future patterns of regional household water consumption in Serbia.

A choice experiment is used to estimate how Vietnamese households value a flood risk reduction. The empirical analysis is conducted on a sample of households located in the Nghe An Province, one of the provinces which is the most affected by floods in Vietnam. The results reveal that there is a high level of heterogeneity in preferences across households. We compute the willingness to pay (WTP) for a flood risk reduction, and we identify how it relates to different attributes of flood management policies (reduction of economic losses, reduction of human losses, political level in charge of implementing the flood management policy). In particular, the marginal WTP for reducing the flood fatality rate, which can be interpreted as the value of statistical life (VSL), varies from 2 517 million VND (approximately 120,818 USD) to 3 590 million VND (approximately 172,323 USD) depending on the model considered. The VSL represents between 77 and 111 times the annual household average income in our sample, a result in line with previous estimates in similar countries.

The relationship between biodiversity and each ecosystem service or bundle of ecosystem services (e.g. win−win, win−lose or win−neutral) is an active field of research that requires structured and consistent information. The application of that research for conservation and decision-making can be hampered by the ambiguity found in the definition of the nursery function under the ecosystem service perspective. In this paper, we review how the role of nursery habitats is included in the ecosystem services literature, covering conceptual, biophysical and economic reflections. The role of ecosystems as nurseries is mostly analyzed in coastal environments. The main observation is that there is no consensus on the consideration of the nursery function as a service (e.g. which species or habitats) or on how to assess it (e.g. which indicators or valuation methods). After that review, we analyze three different interpretations given to the nursery function, namely the ecological, conservationist and economic point of view. and we distinguish between different types of assessment that may consider the nursery function. We conclude that the nursery function can be considered an ecosystem service on its own right when it is linked to a concrete human benefit and not when it is represented with indicators of general biodiversity or ecosystem condition. Thus, the analysis of the delivery of ecosystem services should be differentiated from the analysis of ecological integrity. Only with this distinction science may be able to quantify the link between biodiversity and ecosystem services and policy may be effective in halting biodiversity loss. Similar considerations could apply for other biodiversity constituents that may be treated as ecosystem services.

Nitrogen losses in the form of Nitrate (N-NO3) from point and diffuse sources of pollution are recognized to be the leading cause of water body impairment throughout Europe. Implementation of conservation programs is perceived as being crucial for restoring and protecting the good ecological status of freshwater bodies. The success of conservation programs depends on the efficient identification of management solutions with respect to the envisaged environmental and economic objectives. This is a complex task, especially considering that costs and effectiveness of conservation strategies depend on their locations. We applied a multi-objective, spatially explicit analysis tool, the R-SWAT-DM framework, to search for efficient, spatially-targeted solution of Nitrate abatement in the Upper Danube Basin. The Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model served as the nonpoint source pollution estimator for current conditions as well as for scenarios with modified agricultural practices and waste water treatment upgrading. A spatially explicit optimization analysis that considered point and diffuse sources of Nitrate was performed to search for strategies that could achieve largest pollution abatement at minimum cost. The set of optimal spatial conservation strategies identified in the Basin indicated that it could be possible to reduce Nitrate loads by more than 50% while simultaneously provide a higher income.

We mix survey and experimental data to investigate the impact of individual risk preferences on the adoption of perennial energy crops by French farmers in the prospect theory framework. Our results demonstrate that farmers’ degree of loss aversion and probability weighting matter in the adoption decision. The effect of loss aversion is highly dependent on farmers’ reference level, which may be related to land type or farm history, while the effect of probability weighting is highly dependent on land type only. We find that the more loss averse the farmer, and the more weighted the extreme events, the lower the probability of adoption on high-potential land. We also show that farm characteristics are relevant factors: a higher share of low-profitability land drives adoption up whereas cattle breeding tends to hamper adoption.

We examine the possible link between residential water consumption and quality of the water, both raw water and tap water. We first survey the existing literature on residential water use and its relation to water quality. An empirical analysis using French data is then provided. Our findings suggest that the quality of water at the tap, in particular its bacteriological quality, is a strong predictor of residential water consumption.

Participatory approaches to water management, and specifically to transboundary river management, have been widely applied over recent decades. Regarding transboundary rivers, the active involvement of key actors in policy planning is of great importance. In this context, a participatory approach has been used to identify sectors of interest and priorities related to water and development in the Mékrou transboundary River Basin involving three countries: Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger. We conducted a web-based survey to quantify expert opinion on sectors of water management policy and priorities for the Mékrou River Basin. The same set of questions was then put to a sample of local stakeholders living in this river basin. Our analysis reveals some points of convergence and some discrepancies between the opinions of experts and local stakeholders. Overall, it provides a comparative analysis of how experts and local stakeholders prioritize water policy measures, which could influence decision-making.

This chapter explores the experience of public–private partnerships (PPPs) in the provision of urban water and sanitation services. We show that there exists a wide range of PPPs available to the water industry. Across the public and the private parties, these PPPs typically differ in their allocation of decision prerogatives, risks, and revenues. The main question we address is the relationship between the ownership of the PPP and the performance of water services in terms of their technical and cost efficiency, water price, and access to water and sanitation services.

The profitability of a firm is a highly complex concept, as it results from firms’ decisions on investment and production plans, but also from constraints beyond their control (economic regulation, level of competition, economic growth). We analyze the profitability of firms in the water industry by focusing on the impact of economic regulation and the economic environment. The objective is to determine empirical regularities which could explain profitability. Using a panel of firms from developed and transition countries, we show that the profitability of firms in the water sector is in line with that in other network industries. Profitability varies greatly depending on the chosen measure of profitability, firm’s size, the economic environment and the characteristics of regulation in place are essential to understand and explain firm’s profitability. In particular, being regulated by a price-cap scheme appears to be an important determinant of profitability.

In a laboratory experiment we test three regulations imposed on a common-pool resource game with heterogeneous users: an access fee and subsidy scheme, transferable quotas and non-transferable quotas. We calibrate the game so that all regulations improve users’ profits compared to free-access extraction. We compare the regulations according to five criteria: resource preservation, individual profits, profit difference, Pareto-improvement from free-access and sorting of the most efficient users. One of the main findings is that, even though it performs better in sorting out the most efficient subjects, the fee and subsidy scheme is not more profitable than tradable quotas.

This paper describes an analysis of farmer cropping-plan decision-making. We surveyed 30 farmers to study the dynamics of their cropping-plan decision-making on irrigated arable farms. Using methods from cognitive science, we analysed the ways farmers managed uncertainty through planning and reactive decisions. In this study we show that representing cropping-plan selection only as a resource-allocation or crop-rotation-design problem is not sufficient to account for farmers’ decision-making processes. We show that cropping-plan decision-making does not occur once per year or per rotation, as is usually represented in models, but is a continuous process mixing design and adaptive activities. We describe the concepts that farmers use to plan cropping over time. We also highlight the importance of organising farmland into spatial crop-management blocks as a major determinant of cropping-plan strategies. We argue that deep understanding of these processes at the farm level is required before it is possible to model and design flexible and environmentally friendly cropping systems that fit with farmers’ reality.

This paper reports an investigation of the impact of price policies (PP) and non-price policies (NPP) on residential water demand. Using a sample of US water utilities located in Wisconsin, residential water demand was estimated by taking into account the fact that some of the characteristics of local communities that determine PP and NPP choices may also influence residential water consumption levels. It is first shown that neglecting endogeneity of PP or NPP may lead to biased parameter estimates. Second, it is demonstrated that the policy mix (PP or NPP) may be as important as the level of prices for determining water consumption. Lastly, evidence is provided that dissemination efforts made by local communities to promote NPP drive the effectiveness of those policies.

We empirically investigate the determinants of household flood protective strategies and risk perception using data from a household-level survey conducted in spring 2012 in Vietnam. Our empirical analysis shows that some flood protective behaviours of Vietnamese households are driven by the perception of flood risks, a result consistent with the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT). Our results also suggest that both perceived probabilities and perceived consequences of floods are related to some cognitive processes included in the PMT. Lastly, we document the important role played by public flood management policies in shaping individual flood risk perception and protective behaviours.

We elicit the risk preferences of a sample of French farmers in a field-experiment setting, considering both expected utility and cumulative prospect theory. Under the EU framework, our results show that farmers are characterised by a concave utility function for gain outcomes implying risk aversion. The CPT framework confirms this result, but also suggests that farmers are twice as sensitive to losses as to gains and tend to pay undue attention to unlikely extreme outcomes. Accounting for loss aversion and probability weighting can make a difference in the design of effective and efficient policies, contracts or insurance schemes.

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We use a multiple price list approach with real payments to elicit long-term time preferences on a sample of French farmers. Elicited individual discount rates vary with the time delay, which supports the existence of a reversal effect in long-term time preferences, and increase with rewards, which contradicts the usual magnitude effect finding.

The objective of this thesis is to identifier the determinants of farmers' adoption of perennial energy crops by focusing on issues of risk and time. The analysis is based on the case of miscanthus (Miscanthus giganteus) and switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) in France, but is potentially generalizable to other perennial crops. The relevant public and private decisions to encourage the development of these crops are debated. In the first paper, we evaluate the impact of risk and time on the optimal area of miscanthus and switchgrass in a field crop farm in the Centre region. We go beyond the usual net present value calculation by explicitly accounting for risk aversion and intertemporal fluctuations through the expected utility and discounted utility frameworks. Our results show that the two perennials are on average less profitable than the traditional rapeseed/wheat/barley rotation. However, they can be very competitive as diversification crops when suitable production contracts are offered to farmers. The second, third, and fourth articles exploit data from a survey and experiment conducted with 111 farmers in Burgundy who were faced with the choice of whether or not to grow miscanthus. The second article describes miscanthus production in Burgundy. We show on the one hand that miscanthus is mostly planted on marginal plots that are not very profitable for traditional uses. We also show that, even in the presence of long-term contracts, farmers perceive miscanthus as less risky overall than wheat, but remain concerned about specific risks with unlikely but extremely unfavorable outcomes. In the third paper, we estimate farmers' risk preferences from the experimental data. We apply a structural estimation method to a decision model consistent with prospect theory. We then review a number of implications of this theoretical framework for agricultural economists. Our estimates indicate that prospect theory explains our data better than standard expected utility theory. This is because farmers are loss averse and distort probabilities to give significant weight to extreme events. In the fourth paper, we examine the relationship between miscanthus adoption and farmer and farm characteristics, in particular individual risk and time preferences. The latter are represented by experimental measures obtained under prospect theory and hyperbolic discounting respectively. Our results suggest that the probability of miscanthus adoption depends on the degree of loss aversion of farmers and the extent to which they distort probabilities. However, the impact of these two factors varies with the type of plot considered and the farmers' reference point. In addition, the probability of adoption is higher the higher the proportion of unprofitable land on the farm, and the higher the proportion of land that is not already being used for livestock production.

This thesis is a contribution to the analysis of agricultural water scarcity in temperate climates. It proposes resource allocation models from the plot to the regional scale. The empirical applications are based on the coupling of economic and agronomic models. The first chapter is a review of existing water policies. The second chapter presents the conditions under which the water demand function is identifiable. The third chapter studies the impact of a temporary ban on irrigation on the water demand function: this device may induce a higher annual consumption of the resource than in an unregulated situation. The fourth chapter considers the problem of sharing a scarce water resource between heterogeneous farmers facing climatic risk. It is shown that second-order allocation rules affect individual profits without significantly modifying the aggregate surplus.

Crop rotation, i.e., the allocation of crops to the different plots of land on the farm, is a fundamental element of the farmer's strategy. It is the result of a balance between multiple constraints and objectives combining social, economic, agronomic and environmental (resource use) dimensions. It reflects two dimensions: a strategic dimension (linked to the farm's orientations) and a tactical dimension more related to the adaptation of allocations following changing contexts (climate' price). In order to represent these two levels and thus structure the issues related to crop rotation choices at the farm level, we propose an approach based on: i) an analysis of the decision-making process through on-farm surveys. ii) dynamic modeling of both biophysical processes (crop models) and management processes (decision model) to understand and simulate.

The purpose of this thesis is to provide, from the economic theory, elements of reflection for an effective management of the aquifer system of Gironde. In the first chapter, a spatial model for the management of a coastal aquifer subject to saline intrusion is presented. This model integrates the displacement of the interface between the salty water of the sea and the fresh water of the aquifer. The analysis, conducted at stationary equilibrium, allows us to identify the cost externalities that users exert on each other in space. In chapter 2, we show that a city located upstream can, through high withdrawals, deny a city downstream direct access to the aquifer resource. The social costs then diverge from the private costs. The introduction of spatially differentiated abstraction charges leads city utility managers to make optimal decisions. In Chapter 3, we consider a joint exploitation of the aquifer and a substitute resource. We show that the optimal supply from both water resources depends on the location of the users. Here again, the upstream users' withdrawals from the aquifer resource must take into account the scarcity of the latter. In the second part of this thesis, we estimate water demand functions for the Gironde department. The estimation of the water demand function of the Gironde domestic users, presented in chapter 5, is carried out on a sample of communes observed from 1990 to 1994. The results show a real, but moderate, sensitivity of domestic users to the price of water. In chapter 6, we estimate the water demand functions of the industrialists of Gironde by a dual multiproduct approach of the representation of their technology. The results of the estimations finally reflect a greater sensitivity to the price of water for industrial users than for domestic users.