In May 2016, a conference was held in honor of Richard E. Howitt's 40 year career as an agricultural and resource economist. The conference was aimed at bringing together the vast body of work initiated by Richard E. Howitt and his students and collaborators in agricultural production and natural resource management modeling. The papers in the conference outlined the development and state-of-the art developments in key applications ranging from positive mathematical programming (PMP), water resource management, the application of information theoretic methods to environmental decision making, and other empirical work.

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Some of the papers presented at the conference (in addition to others) were made into a book (released in 2019), published by Springer. See this link  and this flyer for details. 

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The agenda of the conference is here, and the various sessions and presentations are listed below. 

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Opening:

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Richard’s career and its influence on the ag & resource econ community (Siwa Msangi)

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Topic 1: Applied methods for ag production modeling 

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Positive Mathematical Programming (Pierre Merel)

Applied Ag sector modeling for California (Steve Hatchett)

Applied methods for examining European Ag Policy (Bruno Henry de Frahan )

Modeling agricultural abatement cost (Cloe Garnache)

The role of soil quality in crop choice (Peter Berck)

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Topic 2: Applied methods in water resources management

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Hydro-economic modeling: the SWAP-CALVIN interface (Josue Medellin-Azuara)

Water markets in the Western US (Kristiana Hansen)

Water quantity & quality problems in China (Qiuqiong Huang)

Hydro-economic modeling in the Brazilian context (Marcelo Torres)

Spatial groundwater dynamics and resource management (Keith Knapp)

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Topic 3: Information-theoretic and experimental methods

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Experimental methods in water resource management & policy (Jonathan Kaplan)

Information-theoretic methods for parameterizing economic models (Siwa Msangi)

Entropy-based estimation of crop rotation dynamics (Richard Howitt, Duncan MacEwan)

Experimental economics: Applications for resource problems (Jim Murphy)

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Topic 4: Agriculture & natural resource policy

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Applied analysis in designing California's water resource infrastructure (Jay Lund)

Applied analysis in designing California's water resource policy (Ellen Hanak)

Applied methods in addressing issues in California's ag sector (Daniel Sumner)

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Closing session - reflections of colleagues, friends & collaborators

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Australia's water (Mike Young)

California Ag (Jay Noel)

Resource Policy (John Antle)

Teaching Resource Economics (James E Wilen)

Mentoring and dissertation (Mimako Kobayashi)

Reflections on Richard E. Howitt (Gordon Rausser, Rich Adams)

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