Creating American Farmland: Governance Institutions and Investment in Agricultural Drainage
研究美国玉米带农业排水投资的历史，发现排水管理区这一制度创新使东部自然湿润县的土地价值提升20-37%，但导致超过一半的殖民时期湿地被转为农业用地。
The Corn Belt is famously responsible for the bulk of U.S. corn production, and over half of its production comes from counties that rely on artificial drainage. We trace the history of this extensive investment in farmland and document the importance of a key institutional innovation, the drainage management district, which increased the land value of naturally wet eastern U.S. counties by 20–37 percent ($16.8–18.7 billion in 2020 dollars). While dramatically increasing agricultural productivity, drainage converted more than half of the 215 million acres of wetlands estimated to have existed in the United States at the time of colonization to agriculture.