Excellence in Research - Nancy E. Bockstael

Dr. Nancy Bockstael has been a faculty member in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics since 1980. She has made immeasurable contributions to the University as a teacher, administrator, and researcher. Her research success has earned her recognition as a Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association (AAEA), a prestigious lectureship at annual AAEA meetings, and invitations to lecture around the world. She serves in numerous academic journals, in addition to serving as associate editor of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM) and on additional editorial boards.

Dr. Bockstael has made many seminal research contributions on agriculture and environment. She is one of the principal founders of non-market welfare economics and revealed preference valuation of the environment. Her revealed preference methods of recovering welfare effects have facilitated a generation of empirical research on valuation of environmental amenities where direct measurement is not possible except by dubious subjective methods.

Recently, Dr. Bockstael has been a pioneer in spatial economic modeling of land use. She has examined land use in the rural-urban fringe, the role of spatial externalities in individual interactions, agricultural land preservation, growth control, and spatial econometric issues. Dr. Bockstael's work has made theoretical advances by considering optimal development timing to explain low-density sprawl. She has made numerous presentations including a week-long seminar at the University of Graz in Austria, and at the Beijer Institute in Stockholm.

Dr. Bockstael's research has also made important contributions on the impact of pollution on water resource and recreation benefits, food quality, fisheries and forestry management, and many other environmental issues. She has been instrumental in combining the principles of economics with environmental sciences. She has two large grants from the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation. She was also awarded a grant from NASA working with a geographer on remote sensing. Because of her work on land use with remote sensing data, she has participated in major workshops and is serving on two major international steering communities.

For more information, contact Gail Yeiser

Last updated: 03/12/2009