Research

Since 2013, Tennessee has maintained a nine-week personal finance course as a secondary graduation requirement, making the state one of eight who have done so as of 2023. We survey instructors throughout the state to evaluate the course standards and determine if said standards are working based on the following criteria: effectiveness, student engagement, conciseness, relevance, clarity, and confidence level. Under the criteria, the instructors, although confident in their ability to teach the course, rate the standards a 79 out of 100, citing time to be the greatest factor in limiting the success of their course.

What are the key factors that led to the termination of tobacco subsidies? This question is explored through the analytical frameworks of Tullock's transitional gains trap and the Stigler-Peltzman theory of regulation, emphasizing the roles of rent-seeking and rent-extraction in agricultural subsidy policies. The study discusses how adverse impacts on consumer health and changing political priorities led to a policy shift from supporting tobacco producers to protecting consumers against its negative externalities. The transitional gains trap can be overturned when the majority is more informed of the negative externalities than the welfare contributions of the program. 

Nothing so permanent as a Temporary Government Program. - Milton Friedman

Using the USDA's Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) data, this paper investigates the financial literacy factors influencing tax distinctions among U.S. farmers. Through logistic regression analysis, it was found that higher education significantly impacts farmers' tax choices, often leading them to opt for simpler structures rather than LLCs. The study argues that farm tax designations are primarily driven by the complexity of the business and the necessity of property rights. Farms with multiple legal partners are more likely to choose an LLC for its risk management benefits, while sole-owner operations tend to default to simpler tax structures to suit their business needs.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field. - Dwight D. Eisenhower

This paper examines the effects of government program termination on agricultural production by analyzing how tobacco farmers responded to the two-phase elimination of federal support that occurred with the 2004 Fair and Equitable Tobacco Reform Act and the 2014 termination of all transition payments. Using annual national tobacco production data from the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service spanning 1999-2019, I employ interrupted time series analysis to identify the causal effects of these policy interventions on production trends. The analysis reveals contrasting effects between the two policy transitions: the 2004 intervention, which ended price supports while initiating decoupled transition payments, significantly reversed declining production trends, transforming an 11.4\% annual decline into near-stability during the transition period. In contrast, the 2014 termination of all government support accelerated production decline to 12.2\% annually, suggesting that the apparent stability during the buyout period masked underlying structural vulnerabilities in the tobacco sector. These findings provide the first empirical evidence that decoupled payments have meaningful production effects contrary to theoretical predictions about their market neutrality, demonstrating that such payments can delay but not eliminate the structural adjustments required when industries lose government protection. The results offer important insights for policymakers considering the termination of other long-standing agricultural support programs and contribute to the broader literature on transitional gains, decoupled payments, and the political economy of government program reform.