This paper identifies the effect of agricultural subsidies on farmland rental rates in the United States. Rental agreements are primarily between farmers and non-farmer landlords, but no evidence exists concerning the incidence of subsidies on these two groups. By exploiting a unique policy change in 1996 and a nationally representative dataset of individual farms, I solve the endogeneity problem with fixed effects and instrumental variables techniques. I show that non-farmer landlords capture forty percent of the marginal subsidy dollar per acre. This finding is in sharp contrast to the basic assumptions in the literature that suggest full incidence on the landlords. I discuss possible characteristics of the farmland rental market that would result in less than perfect incidence.

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Models of spreading processes over nontrivial networks are commonly motivated by modeling and analysis of biological networks, computer networks, and human contact networks. However, learning the spread parameters of such models has not yet been explored in detail, and the models have not been validated by real data. In this paper, we present several different spread models from the literature and explore their relationships to each other; for one of these processes, we present a sufficient condition for asymptotic stability of the healthy equilibrium, show that the condition is necessary and sufficient for uniqueness of the healthy equilibrium, and present necessary and sufficient conditions for estimating the spread parameters. Finally, we employ two real data sets, one from John Snow's seminal work on cholera epidemics in London in the 1850s and the other one from the United States Department of Agriculture, to validate an approximation of a well-studied network-dependent susceptible-infected-susceptible model.

The idea that agricultural subsidies are fully capitalized into farmland values forms the foundation of the argument that subsidies are entitlements and removing them would drastically reduce farmland asset values. Surprisingly little evidence substantiates this claim. Using field-level data and explicitly controlling for potentially confounding variables we find that landlords only capture between 14 -24 cents of the marginal subsidy dollar. The duration of the rental arrangement has a substantial effect on the incidence. Initially, landlords extract 44 cents of the marginal subsidy dollar, but the incidence falls by 1.5 cents with each additional year of the rental arrangement. This duration effect reveals that rental market frictions play an important role in the farmland rental market.