Department of Economics and Center for Economic and Public Policy (CEPP) invites you to attend a research talk in the Economics Seminar Series, 2023

Title of the Paper: Gendered Perspectives on Conservation Decision-Making: An Laboratory Experiment in an Agricultural Land Leasing Context

Abstract: In this study, we evaluate using controlled laboratory experiments, the efficacy of different contractual arrangements (fixed rent, fixed rent with penalty and discount contracts) offered by agricultural landowners to their tenant producers, in incentivizing environmental conservation on rented agricultural landscapes. A key contribution of this study is the focus on the gender of the landowner and the tenant and how that influences the likelihood of implementing pro- conservation land use practices on rented land. We are interested in this issue as an increasing amount of farmland in the U.S. is owned by women landowners but is rented from them by male tenants who given gendered social norms within the rural community may be unwilling to follow their landowners’ prescriptions about pro-conservation land use implementation on the operation. In this context, we examine whether the anticipation of tenant backlash induces women landowners, more than men, to select contracts with lower rental rates, and accept land use practice implementation on their property associated with poorer conservation outcomes. For this, we investigate the role of communication between the landowner and the tenant on rental contracts offered and conservation action choice and the extent to which gender identity influences behavior. Our results indicate that gender identity made salient through priming, impacts landowner's contract choices significantly. Specifically, male landowners act moregenerously towards their male tenants by offering discount contracts rather than any other contracts. However, whether a female landowner incentivizes conservation through a discount or penalty contract depends on whether priming her gender identity generates a strong sense of self for the female participant or not. Male tenants facing male landowners are more likely to choose conservation actions than when facing their female landowners. Communication is also found to impact landowners and tenants differently with a significant impact on tenant behavior only. Our results provide evidence of how gender identity influences decisions of landowners and tenants – two types of individuals whose actions are instrumental to produce environmental conservation benefits from intensively managed agricultural landscapes.

About the Speaker: Dr. Simanti Banerjee has joined the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in August 2014. Previously she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Oberlin College in Ohio (2013-14) and a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Stirling in Scotland UK (2010-13). She received a Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University (2010). Her research deals with analyzing coordination within groups, inter-personal bargaining, and the impact of information, communication and social networks on human decision making in a variety of contexts. Using experimental and behavioral economic methods, and surveys she studies performance of various farmland conservation policies, drivers of technology adoption, and decision making under risk & uncertainty. Her lab and field research program has been funded by grants from the USDA-NIFA, USDA-ERS and USDA-CBEAR in addition to the Maude Hammond Fling Faculty Research Fellowship awarded by the UNL Research Council.