This is a draft paper, submitted in advance of presentation at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association.

The spatial configuration of land use can have a significant impact on both market and non-market outcomes. One type of land use configuration that has received considerable attention in recent decades - because of its impact on the efficiency of public service provisioning, on environmental...

Small communities sometimes increase their local sales tax rate in order to maintain or expand public services. The question addressed here is what is the net effect of changing sales tax rates on revenues from sales taxes? Using both semiparametric and nonparametric regression, we find retail...

Are working-age rural migrants to urban areas really better off? This paper uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1979 to 1997 to answer this question. It builds on literature by Fisher (2005, 2007) on the role of unmeasured characteristics in influencing rural residential...

The presentation deals with the quantification of villages' and rural communities' conditions. Distributing financial sources of rural development among the regions is not an easy task. The authors confirm the fact that the results of different methods used for quantifying conditions may be...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/02/10.

This paper assesses the cost efficiency of indicator-based targeting. Using household survey data from Malawi, we examine whether an indicator-based targeting of the poor is more target- and cost-efficient than the currently used mechanisms for targeting agricultural subsidy programs in the...

In Afghanistan, where 80% of the population is rural, irrigated agriculture is important for satisfying subsistence needs. While most of the irrigated agriculture is fed by diversion canal systems which tap surface flows, legal and physical water infrastructure in the region is generally poor. A...

In recent decades there has been a substantial increase in the scale of production and the use of production contracts in the hog sector. This paper explores empirically whether these two phenomena are related by examining whether the use of production contracts has allowed finish hog operations...

Replaced with revised version of paper 09/27/11.