New Generation Cooperatives have emerged as a contemporary means for farmers to invest in further processing activities. This paper considers real options as the basis for evaluating producer investment in a start-up cooperative that involves technological uncertainty. The investment and risk...

Two well-known hypotheses from the literature on tournaments are that (1) tournaments can filter out common shocks thereby reducing agents risk exposure; and (2) disincentive effects can arise when a tournament scheme is administered on a group of mixed ability agents. While handicapping and/or...

Experimental economics is used to compare tournaments (T) and fixed performance contracts (F) when agents have heterogeneous costs. Our primary findings were: (1) There is no statistical difference in average pooled effort (effort by high ability and low ability subjects are pooled together to...

We evaluate the persistence of incremental industry, firm-specific, and corporate-parent effects on firm profitability across the food and agribusiness sector and further analyze the persistence within four major sectors: processing, wholesale, retail, and restaurant. Results suggest that...

This paper provides supplemental tables to accompany Boland, M.A. and J.M. Crespi. “From Farm Management to Agricultural and Applied Economics: The Expansion of a Professional Society as Seen through a Census of Its Dissertations from 1951 to 2005.” Applied Economics Perspectives and Policy...

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and their negative effect on the environment is a growing concern in the world. It is estimated that agriculture is responsible for 7% of the total GHG emissions in the United States. Currently, environmental policies to regulate GHG are in place in different...

We examine firm profitability in the food economy and determine the source of variance of firm profitability in family-owned and non-family-owned food processing firms. The results indicate firm effects dominate in explaining the variance in the business-segment performance in the food economy....