This paper examined cost efficiency differences between rural hospitals participating in the Critical Access Hospital (CAH) Program and a group of non-converting, prospectively paid rural hospitals using both a two-stage semi-parametric approach as well as stochastic frontier analysis (SFA)....

Our initial findings indicate that GM crops do not contribute to the decline of traditional family farms. We make a significant methodological impact by using the within transformation to remove unobserved individual effects and demonstrate that the within transformation results in ML estimates...

Small and limited resource farmers and landowners in the Alabama Black Belt region face many challenges as they seek to make their farms and forestlands profitable, productive and environmentally sustainable. A host of problems—farmland conversion, urbanization pressures, reductions in water...

In the research area of crop yield density estimation and in particular in risk analysis, little emphasis has been given to the appropriateness of transformation methods (e.g., removing a linear trend) and how such transformations impact the reliability of the empirical distribution functions...

Adoption decisions and profitability of advanced breeding technologies are analyzed for U.S. dairy farms. The bivariate probit with selection model is used. Results show that specialized, younger, more educated farmers with longer planning horizons are more likely to adopt the technologies, with...

The purpose of this research was to determine whether indirect land use occurs and if so to what extent. Indirect land use is a change from non-cropland to cropland (e.g. deforestation) that may occur in response to increasing scarcity of cropland. As farmers worldwide respond to higher crop...

Nematode management in cotton has eluded farmers and researchers for decades. Control strategies have typically relied upon highly toxic nematicide application. Site-specific management provides opportunity to improve profitability while maintaining environmental stewardship; and can be based on...

This study examines preferences for cattle traits using mixed logit and latent class models. Choice experiment data from a 2013 mail survey of 1,052 U.S. grass-fed beef producers were used. Preliminary results indicate that producers prefer lower-priced, heavy, black, and easy-to-handle feeders...

The timing to terminate cotton insecticide applications are disputed among investigators. Nine publically available studies meeting selection criteria were synthesized to identify and develop a comprehensive optimal termination timing principle. The meta-database included 247 trial observations...