This paper considers the time path of prices for crop traits such as herbicide resistance, specifically whether they conform to Coase's conjecture that monopoly prices can't be sustained on durables. While property rights determine whether such traits are durables, prices for RR soybeans and Bt...

This study has estimates a Fourier flexible production frontier to examine agricultural productivity in forty-one sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries during 1961-1999. The primary empirical result is that only nine of these countries experienced productivity improvements, while average...

Using 5 minute data, we examine market volatility in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the presence of trading collars. We use a polynomial specification for capturing intraday seasonality. Results indicate that market volatility is 3.4 percent higher in declining markets when trading collars...

Drainwater management strategies include source control, reuse, treatment, and evaporation ponds; questions of interest are efficient management, policy instruments, and sustainability. A high level of source control is indicated absent reuse due to the relatively high cost of evaporation ponds;...

This study divides the U.S. economy into the agricultural and industrial sectors and compares the degree of the involvement of exchange rates in each sector without specifying the rigid assumption of either exogeneity or endogeneity of exchange rates. Both short- and long-run impacts of shocks...

We offer a decentralized solution to the asymmetric information and hidden action problems in the nonpoint source (NPS) pollution case. Farmers in the same watershed generate homogeneous NPS pollution. The regulator, R, pays for (or represents a group of point-source, PS, polluters who pay for)...

When contract production is marketed contemporaneously with production sold through a spot market, it is conveninet to specify the contract price in terms of the subsequent cash price. This paper examines the competitive implications of such pricing arrangements, focusing in particular upon...

The value of an innovative new seed technology is evaluated in a discrete stochastic programming framework for a representative farm in the northern Corn Belt. Temperature-activated polymer coated seed has the potential to increase net returns by reducing yield loss due to delayed planting and...

This paper develops a model of farmer decision-making to examine the extent to which uncertainties about the performance of site-specific technologies (SSTs) and about the weather impact the value of these technologies. The model uses the jointly estimated risk and technology parameters to...

The goal of this paper is to provide the U.S. dairy industry with elasticities of Japan's derived demand for imported cheese differentiated by source country of production. These estimates are then used to assess the relative competitiveness of cheese imported from the U.S. to cheese imported...