Achievement

Trainee Melissa Whited’s paper, “Economic Impacts of Irrigation Water Transfers on Uvalde County, Texas,” published in the Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy, used economic modeling to explore the potential impacts of marketable water transfer permits. This paper contributes to national and international debates about the use of market-based solutions to improve the efficiency of water use and distribution. Rather than using aggregate agricultural output functions, Whited modeled the impact of these permits using the crop mix actually produced in Uvalde County. She showed that permit-enabled water transfers would “negatively affect the county’s employment, labor income, and output significantly, and that labor income changes are particularly sensitive to the use of crop budgets [in the model] as opposed to aggregate production functions.”