Consolidation in the U.S. pork industry continues to reduce the number of operations, while increasing the demand for hired labor. This paper explores how wages have evolved over time by decomposing the increase in wages into a change in the level of wages, human capital, and returns to human...

Although managing labor has become important for farm operations success, training and education for farm managers focuses on agricultural production management and few studies provide an empirical basis on how agricultural labor management differs from labor management in other industries. With...

Production contract tournaments induce self-selection among producers. Self-selection for pork differs from broiler production resulting in a predictably different political response by incumbent producers to contract innovation. The higher capital and status of incumbent pork producers than...

This paper reports on results for a graded-pair comparison questionnaire where respondents rate pairs of Pacific Northwest salmon preservation options. Each of the preservation options includes the number of jobs lost and the level of salmon preserved. Ordered-probit analysis is used to estimate...

In the past 20 years the average scale of hog operations has expanded more than fourfold, and some of the new large-scale hog feeding operations have been opposed by residents in some communities. While the environmental effects of such production have been relatively well studied, less examined...

Food processing has been widely recognized as a traditional, unskilled-labor intensive production. Yet rapid development in technology drives food processing into more sophisticated and technology-oriented industry. This paper utilizes a fixed effects model to test the hypothesis that the food...

This paper examines the effects of state and local immigration enforcement efforts on the U.S. Farming sector. We use variation in enforcement efforts generated by the timing of adoption of 287(g) programs by state and county law enforcement agencies (allowing local officers to be trained to...

We analyze the link between large and destructive floods and armed conflict in 117 countries between 1985 and 2009 employing flood-induced migration as a potential transmission channel. We use rainfall as an instrument for flood-induced migration and employ a two step procedure (Rivers and Vuong...

International students offer an unique opportunity to study the extent to which environment causes obesity. Because international students have an imperfect ability to choose their destination and are less aware of the social and cultural conditions in and around the university campus we argue...