Agricultural cooperatives are participating in mergers, acquisitions, strategic alliances, and joint ventures at a record pace. While post-post merger performance has been examined extensively for investor owned firms, this has not been the case for agricultural cooperatives since these firms do...

There is considerable evidence of high returns to public investments in agricultural R&D, but because intellectual property in agriculture is considered a public good, little R&D investment by growers themselves. This study investigates the potential for growers to increase commodity sales...

Contracting directly between produce shippers and retailers is growing in importance. Retailers seek to obtain reliable supplies, while reducing their reliance on recurring market transactions. Producers seek stable prices and market access. These private transactions diminish spot market...

Weekly grid premium and discount price date for fed cattle have been collected over a 3-year period. The grid price data are combined with carcass data (2590 South Dakota slaughter steers) to investigate the variability in the average weekly carcass premium is affected by changes in...

Labor and skill premiums and their relationships with trade measures are simultaneously estimated within the framework of an individual level labor supply model for Jamaica using truncated regression models. Increased imports from the US were found to reduce the return to unskilled labor, and...

Quantile regression is used to evaluate the effect of WIC participation on the nutrient intakes of WIC-eligible preschoolers. Estimates based on 1994-96, 1998 CSFII data show that the WIC effects vary by quantile for iron and zinc while the effects are equal across quantiles for calcium.

This research uses field-level data from Burkina Faso to ask what determines farmers' investment in two well-known soil and water conservation techniques: field bunds (barriers to soil and water runoff), and microcatchments (small holes in which seeds and fertilizers are placed). Survey data for...

One of the most important principles in any science is testing and consequently confirmation and falsification. In agricultural economics, the equilibrium displacement model is a popular modeling approach that presently is not testable and consequently cannot be confirmed or falsified. This...

Various bid-ask spread estimators are applied to transaction data from LIFFE commodity futures markets, and the resulting estimates are compared to observed actual bid-ask spreads. Results suggest that actual bid-ask spreads, unlike effective spreads, can be reasonably estimated using...

We examine agricultural contracting parties' incentives to employ quality measurement. Quality measurement will be used if on-farm production of ``quality'' is sufficiently cheap, and quality measurement sufficiently informative. We qualitatively test these predictions with empirical observation...