Dr. Marc Ribaudo is currently retired. He was a branch chief and senior economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service until January, 2018.  He received a B.S. in Natural Resource Management from the University of Maine (1977), an M.S. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of Maine (1979), and a Ph.D in agricultural economics from Penn State University (1983).  He has been working at ERS since 1983, and is currently in the Resource, Environmental, and Science Policy Branch of the Resource and Rural Economics Division.
Dr. Ribaudo has worked primarily on water quality issues related to agriculture, including the water quality impacts of agricultural and conservation programs, the impacts on agriculture of policies for protecting water quality, and the design of policies for reducing nonpoint source pollution.  More recently, he led projects that examined the role of private markets for in supporting conservation measures on farms, policy options for improving nitrogen management, and the costs of different policy approaches for reducing agricultural nonpoint source pollution in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.