15 pages, Increasing popularity of economic experiments for policy impact analysis has led to an on-going debate about the suitability of students to substitute professionals as experimental subjects. To date, subject pool effects in agricultural and resource economics experiments have not been sufficiently studied. In order to identify differences and similarities between students and non-students, we carry out an experiment in the form of a multi-period business management game that is adapted to an agri-environmental context. We compare the compliance behaviour of German agricultural students and German farmers with regard to water protection rules and analyse their responses to two different green nudge interventions. The experimental results reveal that the direction of the response to the policy treatments is similar. Even unexpected behaviour could be reproduced by the student sample. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the treatment effects differed between the two samples. This implies that experimenters in the field of agricultural and resource economics could use the subject pool of students to analyse the direction of nudge policies. If predictions should be made about the magnitude effects, we suggest using a professional subject pool.
15 pages, This paper studies Chinese grape growers’ time discounting and its implications for the adoption of technology that can reduce the negative effects of increasing precipitation. Using primary data collected in Xinjiang Province, we undertook a contingent valuation of rain covers that protect fruit from rain and estimated a discounted utility model using these data. Using a hierarchical Bayesian approach, we find that local grape growers discount the future very heavily, with a discount rate of 0.17 per year, which is almost four times higher than the Chinese market interest rate. Farmers also tend to underestimate the benefits of adopting covers, with their purchase decisions appearing to largely depend on their past actual losses rather than future anticipated losses. These findings have broader implications for policies promoting proactive adaptation in response to likely increased rainfall in the region. Targeting farmers who give lower weight to events far off in the future and understanding that many farmers may tend only to make adoption decisions that have strong short-term benefits could improve the efficacy of climate policies that target agricultural technologies.
