Agricultural land taxes on cash rental rates, drought impacts and agricultural insurance, and mobile banking access in the Southern Great Plains

Chapter I: Counties periodically adjust tax rates on farmland, which sometimes results in higher tax rates on leased land. Landowners pass the additional burden onto renters, called a tax incidence. A Ricardian land rent model is applied to analyze the incidence of agricultural taxes on cropland rental rates and to determine how much of the tax burden shifts from landowners to renters. This analysis estimates the tax incidence for leased cropland and pastureland in Oklahoma. The results show that while there was no significant incidence for cropland renters, pastureland renters incurred an aggregate incidence of $1.1 million over the study period. Chapter II: Many regions in the United States will experience a hotter, drier climate in the coming decades. This prediction is troubling for rural communities whose economies depend primarily on agricultural production systems susceptible to drought. This study quantified the economic losses experienced by five counties in southwestern Oklahoma that experienced exceptional drought at some point from 2000 to 2021. The study also examines how Federal Crop Insurance Program (FCIP) indemnities for corn, cotton, and wheat mitigate the impacts of drought across all economic sectors. Drought caused an average loss of $163 million in output, 1,084 jobs, and $67 million in value-added per drought year in the communities analyzed. However, FCIP crop indemnities reduced drought-caused losses by 54% to 63%. Chapter III: The objective of this research was to determine the effect of mobile banking access on bank entry and exit in the Southern Great Plains (SGP) region of the United States (US). Following the Great Recession of 2008 there has been considerable research investigating the closure of banks and bank branches and the consequences of “lending deserts” on the economic vitality of rural communities and other areas lacking access to physical banks. However, during this same period, there were novel advances in online and mobile technologies, which led to unprecedented changes in how individuals banked. Findings of the study indicated predominant drivers of bank entry and exit were the entry and exit of other banking institutions. There was no indication that mobile availability affected banking entry or exit.