Staff Biographical Page: Marca Weinberg

Briefly

Marca Weinberg is Associate Director of the Resource and Rural Economics Division. From 2000 to 2009, she served as Chief of the divison's Resource, Environmental, and Science Policy (RESP) Branch. As Branch Chief, she managed a program of activities focused on estimating costs, benefits, and distributional implications of policy design options for addressing the environmental impacts of agricultural production and of the non-commodity services agriculture provides. The policy perspective for this research includes climate and energy policy; conservation programs authorized in Federal farm legislation such as the Conservation and Wetlands Reserve Programs, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and Conservation Compliance; as well as Federal environmental legislation with potential implications for agricultural production, such as the Clean Water Act.

Marca's research background and expertise also include western water issues, such as water quality-quantity tradeoffs, Federal water policy reform, and the economic implications of the Federal Endangered Species Act as applied to species dependent on riverine ecosystems, as well as spatial land use issues, particularly as applied to wetlands management.

Background

Marca became Associate Director in July 2009, after serving for 9 years as RESP Branch Chief. She was Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, from 1995 to 2000. She earllier served as an economist with ERS (1991-93) and with the Congressional Budget Office (1993-95).

Education

Marca received a Ph.D. and an M.S. in Agricultural Economics from the University of California, Davis, and a B.S. in Political Economy of Natural Resources from the University of California, Berkeley.

Publications

See all ERS publications by this author >

Selected Recent Publications

Weinberg, Marca and Roger Claassen, Rewarding Farm Practices versus Environmental Performance, Economic Brief No. EB5, (March 2006), 6 pp.

Ribaudo, Marc and Marca Weinberg, Improving Air and Water Quality Can Be Two Sides of the Same Coin, Amber Waves 3(4, September 2005):34-41.

Cattaneo, Andrea, Roger Claassen, Robert Johansson, and Marca Weinberg, Flexible Conservation Measures on Working Land, Economic Research Report No. 5, Economic Research Service, USDA, (June 2005), 79 pp.

Smith, Katherine and Marca Weinberg. Measuring the Success of Conservation Programs, Amber Waves 2(4, September 2004):14-21.

Weinberg, Marca, Assessing a Policy Grab Bag: Federal Water Policy Reform, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 84(3, August 2002):541-556.

Weinberg, Marca, et al., Biological and Economic Implications of Sacramento Watershed Management Options, Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 38(2, April 2002):367-384.