We design an experiment to simulate how people make agricultural production decisions under three policy scenarios, each incorporating direct payments (DPs): (a) price uncertainty without countercyclical payments (CCPs); (b) price uncertainty with CCPs; and (c) price uncertainty, CCPs, and...

This paper examines the linkages among agricultural total factor productivity, farm size, and farm household participation in the off-farm labor market for the Southeastern states for the period 1960-1996. We find evidence of a simultaneous relationship between productivity and measures of farm...

This study presents evidence that contracting is positively associated with the scale of production for six major U.S. agricultural commodities. Specifically, contract producers tend to operate at a larger scale than do independent producers, and the likelihood of an operation contracting...

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to use the DuPont expansion to examine those factors underlying differences in (rates of) return on different crop portfolios over space (ten regions) and time (1960-2004). The paper also estimates the impact of government payments on farmland values...

This article employs the superlative Fisher and Trnqvist indexes for exact decomposition of growth in nominal revenues and costs. The findings confirm the well-known result that these indexes very closely approximate each other, implying that the mathematically simpler and computationally easier...

This article provides a farm sector comparison of levels of capital input for fourteen OECD countries for the period 1973 to 2002. The starting point for construction of a measure of capital input is the measurement of capital stock. Estimates of depreciable capital are derived by representing...

We investigate second-best, input-based taxes foragricultural nonpoint pollution control when marketprices are endogenous and production isheterogeneous. Theoretically, we derive the optimalforms of taxes which take account of heterogeneity(non-uniform taxes) and a tax which does not (auniform...

Allocations of research funds across programs are often made for efficiency reasons. Social science research is shown to have small, lagged but significant effects on U.S. agricultural efficiency when public agricultural R&D and extension are simultaneously taken into account. Farm management...

The increasing use of production contracts in the hog sector has reduced the number of spot market transactions and raised concerns about price manipulation by packers. These concerns have helped spur legislative efforts to restrict packer ownership of livestock and to regulate livestock...