Prosocial Behavior: Private Contributions to Agriculture's Impact on the Environment

Private provision of public environmental benefits is considered with a theory of prosocial behavior that elaborates the roles of nonhedonistic values held by agents as well as the functional interaction between private good and public good production processes. The theory also identifies the conditions under which public environmental goods will be privately supplied and motivates an empirical approach. Models of environmental effort in agriculture are estimated based on a survey of U.S. field crop farmers. Results confirm the role of hedonistic motivation of environmental effort and provide very weak evidence of a role of nonhedonistic values.