A structural time series model is used to estimate the supply response function for broiler production in the United States using quarterly data and a structural time series model. This model has the advantage of expressing trend and seasonal elements as stochastic components, allowing a dynamic interpretation of the results and improving the forecast capabilities of the model. The results of the estimation indicate the continued importance of feed costs to poultry production and of technology as expressed by the stochastic trend variable. However, seasonal influences appear to have become less important, since the seasonal component was not statistically significant.

The implicit price (hedonic) equation for the housing market in a coastal town in southern Rhode Island was estimated using a conditional Box-Cox maximum likelihood procedure. Linear, log-linear, and semi-log functional forms were rejected with 95% confidence. Estimates of marginal implicit prices for water related attributes (view of, frontage on, and proximity to a coastal salt water pond) derived from these rejected models were quite different from those determined from the optimal functional form. This result has important ramifications for public policy, as is shown in an example, since these attributes were found to be highly valued in the housing market.

The organization of the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, retail food industry was analyzed to determine whether spatial competition influenced the cost and availability of food items. Using a spatial competition gravity variable, the costs of two separate market baskets were analyzed in January 2009, and the factors influencing spatial competition were determined. Store type (chain or supercenter) was found to be the most significant determinant of food costs, validating findings of past studies. Although food was not found to be more expensive in low-income areas, results suggest that residents in low-income and rural areas have disincentives to purchase affordable, available healthy food due to the spatial organization of their local food market.

This article examines the flexibility of the Johnson system of distributions by assessing its performance in terms of modeling crop yields for the purpose of setting actuarially fair crop insurance premiums. Using data from corn farms in Illinois coupled with Monte Carlo simulation procedures, we found that average crop insurance premiums computed on the basis of the Johnson system provide reasonably accurate estimates even when the data are normal or come from a non-normal distribution other than the Johnson system (i.e., a beta). These results suggest that there is potential for using the Johnson system to rate previously uninsured crops that do not have historical insurance performance data upon which to base premium calculations.

This study investigates the environmental impacts of several forms of policies that offer farmers subsides in return for the adoption of conservation tillage. The policies differ as to whether the tillage practice or one of several environmental benefits is targeted. We develop an Environmental Lorenz Curve which fully represents the performance of the targeting policies, and show that this curve can be directly used to help select the optimal targeting strategy for special classes of social welfare functions. The model is applied to the state of Iowa.

A telephone survey of all of the surviving families of people killed in farm accidents in New York between 1985 and 1987 (52 of 87 families interviewed, 60% response rate) found the average total annual present value of expected income foregone because of fatal farm accidents in New York is over $8.6 million (in 1987 dollars). Less than five years after the accidents, 67% of the families who operated the farms where the accidents occurred no longer operate them and 44% no longer live on the farms.

In the last 20 years, both public and private expenditures on resource conservation and environmental protection have increased dramatically. However, there are numerous technical and political barriers to the efficient use of conservation funds. This paper discusses some of these barriers and approaches to overcoming them. It argues that ecosystem complexities such as threshold effects, ecosystem linkages, and spatial connections often mitigate against politically palatable criteria for resource allocation. Ignoring these complexities is likely to result in substantial efficiency losses. While challenges are daunting for the efficient management of conservation investments, payoff is potentially high for the use of sciences.

The relative performance of public and private enterprises has been long debated. We construct a comprehensive violation dataset based on the EPA's Safe Drinking Water Information System to empirically investigate the compliance behavior of publicly and privately owned Public Water Systems (PWSs). Our results show that publicly owned PWSs commit significantly more Maximum Contamination Level, Treatment Technique, and Health-Related violations but fewer Monitor and Reporting violations than privately owned PWSs. We also find that municipal-level heterogeneities explain a substantial amount of variation in violation behaviors among PWSs, suggesting water supply quality depends crucially on location-specific regulations and local economic conditions.

The Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture (URAA) put in place a set of rules that may, in the future, have significant effects on the conditions for market access for agricultural products. Bound tariffs replaced non-tariff barriers in most cases, and rules facing exporters are now more transparent. In addition, minimum access commitments were made through the use of import quotas, with a lower tariff for imports within the quota. Although agriculture is now integrated into the multilateral trading system, most commentators agree that the URAA did little actually to liberalize agricultural trade. Bound out-of-quota tariffs remain very high while quotas have resulted in the institutionalization of rents for specific countries and firms or state trading enterprises, thereby potentially increasing resistance by these stakeholders to any trade liberalization initiatives.

Major increases in energy prices since 1973 have raised considerable interest in the effect of a continuation of these increases on interregional competition. There is speculation in the Northeast that a general increase in energy prices will cause agricultural production to shift closer to the consumers. This production shift supposedly will lead to self-sufficiency in many products which were once grown in the Northeast and are now largely imported from other regions. This paper uses a simple interregional trade model to estimate the possible impact of higher energy prices on interregional competition, and on the Northeast in particular. It does this by assuming values for the relevant variables in the model and estimating the changes in the system. A range of values are used to estimate the sensitivity of the conclusions to the assumptions.

This paper provides a decomposition of output growth among olive-growing farms in Greece during the period 1987–1993 by integrating Bauer's (1990) and Bravo-Ureta and Rieger's (1991) approaches. The proposed methodology is based on the use of self-dual production frontier functions. Output growth is attributed to the size effect, technical change, changes in technical and input allocative inefficiency, and the scale effect. Empirical results indicate that the scale and the input allocative inefficiency effects, which were not taken into account in previous studies on output growth decomposition analysis, have caused a 7.3% slowdown and a 11.0% increase in output growth, respectively. Technical change was found to be the main source of TFP growth while both technical and input allocative inefficiency decreased over time. Still though, a 56.5% of output growth is attributed to input growth.

We use nonparametric production function methods to decompose farm-level labor productivity growth into components attributable to efficiency change, technical change, and factor intensity. The estimation is accomplished using balanced panel data drawn from the Kansas Farm Management Association for the period 1993 to 2007. We find that labor productivity growth is primarily driven by factor intensity and technical change. Efficiency change is declining with increasing productivity growth, and technical change is not Hicks-neutral and occurs at high levels of factor intensity, suggesting that innovation is embodied in factor intensity.

In this study we attempt to understand the relationship between regional growth in population, employment, and per capita income, and farmland development in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. A spatial simultaneous equations model is estimated using county-level data. Results indicate that while county income growth and agricultural land value increases in neighboring counties increase the rate of farmland loss, growth in county agricultural land values, increases in agricultural land density in neighboring counties, and increases in agricultural income per farm reduce farmland losses. Farmland protection policies were not significant in reducing agricultural land development. This approach, focused on regional growth, provides insight into linkages between growth and agricultural land development that can potentially enhance land use planning.

The hedonic approach has been advanced recently as an important tool for assessing the value of non-market environmental attributes. In its most usual form, the method involves an attempt econometrically to capture differential prices for homes attributable to variations in the environmental characteristic. This technique has been applied with success for a variety of attributes – most notably the study of air pollution. However, the case studies reported here for water quality valuation were much less successful. We advance several reasons why the hedonic approach may be ill-suited to measuring the value of water quality.

The first-difference version of a source-differentiated almost ideal demand system is used to estimate demand for Ivorian rice imports. The results indicate that Thailand will benefit most from an expansion of imports of luxury rice and broken rice products. Vietnam will gain from growth in the market for standard rice. The results also suggest that adoption of a new 35 percent tariff policy to protect the domestic industry will not be enough to improve social welfare in Côte d'Ivoire in spite of increased production value.

Tariff rate quota administration and implementation are empirically evaluated for the fourteen developing countries notifying the WTO of the use of TRQs. FAO trade data, UNCTAD data on applied tariffs and the WTO notifications permit us to assess underfill of quotas, discrimination among exporters, use of state trading as an implementation mechanism, and the extent of protection under these TRQs. Substantial liberalization was found, generally due to use of low MFN tariffs rather than through TRQs permitting greater market access. High tariff bindings and endogenous quotas allow these countries to pursue flexible trade regimes within their WTO commitments.

The study examines the impacts of implementing mandatory country of origin labeling (COOL) on producer and consumer welfare in the U.S. meat industry. The equilibrium displacement model developed in this study includes twenty-nine equations representing retail-, processing-, and farm-level equilibrium conditions for the beef, pork, and chicken industries. Unlike previous studies, the model allows trade between domestic- and foreign-origin products and considers the imperfectly competitive market structure of meat processers. Empirical results show that without a significant increase in domestic meat demand, producers are not expected to benefit from the mandatory COOL implementation. Results of a sensitivity analysis indicate that consumers tend to bear more COOL costs than producers, as the own-price elasticity becomes more inelastic, and that producers’ benefits increase as the elasticity of domestic demand becomes more elastic with respect to the price of imported products. The existence of market power in upstream and downstream markets of processors negatively affects both consumer and producer surplus. One implication of our findings is that U.S. beef and pork producers’ promotion and advertising programs would be successful in expanding domestic demand when the programs make the own-price elasticity of domestic demand more inelastic and the cross-price elasticity of domestic demand more elastic with respect to import price.

Centralized, off-farm compost facilities were evaluated as a disposal option for poultry litter. Disposal fees to growers were required to develop an economically feasible facility for a private investor. The potential for a compost facility to compete with current litter alternatives depends upon development of compost markets comparable to urban areas along with a depressed market price for litter. Given disposal fees and uncertainty associated with market development, further expansion of land application and cattle feeding disposal alternatives is recommended.

We hypothesize that spatial spillovers among neighboring farms are not only driven by spatial proximity, but also by farm profitability considerations. This hypothesis is tested by examining the role of spatial spillovers in shaping somatic cell counts (SCC) on Wisconsin dairy farms. Results show that neighborhood links defined both in terms of geographic proximity and farm profitability give rise to spatial spillovers that affect SCC. Significant differences in the estimated spatial spillovers are observed when defining the neighborhood space in terms of both farm profitability and geographic proximity as opposed to geographic proximity alone, with the data favoring the former specification.

It is a generally known statistical fact that the mean of a nonlinear function of a set of random variables is not equivalent to the function evaluated at the means of the variables. However, in dichotomous choice contingent valuation studies a common practice is to calculate an overall mean (or median) by integrating over offer space (numerically or analytically) an estimated logit or probit function in which sample mean values for the concomitant variables are used. We demonstrate this procedure to be incorrect and we statistically test the procedure against the correct method for nonlinear models. Using data resulting in a well-behaved logit model, we reject the hypothesis of congruence between the two means. Such a finding should be considered in future single response dichotomous choice CVM studies, particularly when aggregation is of interest.