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Although the Clean Water Act's regulation of point source pollution has had a significant effect on water quality, nonpoint sources of pollution, especially animal agriculture, remain a leading unevenly regulated source of water pollution in the United States. This work studies the effectiveness of local manure management regulations on dairy farms in Wisconsin. Wisconsin represents a unique policy experiment in the delegation of nonpoint agricultural pollution policy in a state with economically important small, nonpoint, dairy farms. Using hand collected regulatory data from Wisconsin counties we estimate the effects of changes in local regulations on water quality outcomes. The results demonstrate that a few easily implemented and verifiable regulations such as nutrient management plans have significant short‐term effects on water quality, whereas other less observable and difficult to implement regulations have no discernible effects in the short term. The work points to a number of potential policy levers to improve the Management of nonpoint pollution, as well as the challenges of nonpoint source regulatory policies on slow‐moving hydrologic processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine two potential economic benefits of environmental policy, increased agricultural investment and productivity. This is important because if these benefits are realized, environmental policy could optimize land use for food production while minimizing the negative environmental impacts. We employ multiple empirical techniques to analyze a market-led and a public-led anti-deforestation policy that influence the vast cattle ranching sector in the Brazilian Amazon. We show that both policies increased cattle productivity, while the market-led policy also increased investment. We find no evidence that the two policies were substitutes or complements. Results indicate that the policies were each effective in different market- and land-use-contexts, so that enforcement of both policies increased productivity for a larger set of properties. Our research reveals both indirect and unintended benefits of environmental regulation, which have implications for the design of policies that affect the agricultural sector, a major driver of land-use change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]