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...

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 paper develops a dynamic model of crop production under uncertainty with intraseasonal input choices. Crop production involves multiple stages, including at least seeding, post emergence fertilizer/pesticide application and harvesting. If the farmer receives new information about the output...

This paper describes the first use of a methodology based on a utility-theoretic behavioral model to simultaneously estimate a household's WTP for a non-market good in both money and a non-monetary numeraire good. WTP by subsistence farmers in Namibia for deterrents to wildlife attacks on crops...

Price elasticities and flexibilities for a system of frozen dessert products are estimated from scanner data. Simultaneity tests reject exogeneity of conditional expenditures, but not prices or quantities, at the weekly level. Inverting the elasticity matrix to obtain flexibilities, while...

In areas characterized by wind erosion and shifting sand dunes, shelterbelts can increase crop yields. Groundnut yields in southern India increased with the introduction and maturation of shelterbelts. Decomposition analysis attributed most of the yield increases to the shelterbelts themselves,...

This paper determines the impact of food industry market power on farmers' incentive to promote in a situation where funds for promotion are raised through a per-unit assessment on farm output and food industry technology is characterized by variable proportions. Specifically, building on...

Risk theory tells us if an insurer can effectively pool a large number of individuals to reduce the total risk, he then can provide the insurance by charging a premium close to the actuarially fair rate. There is, however, a common belief that the risk can be effectively pooled only when the...

Using data reporting section-level pesticide use for all of Arizona, this study estimates how early-season adoption of new biorational insecticides reduced subsequent broad-spectrum insecticide applications in cotton. The two-stage econometric model accounts for the endogeneity and censoring of...

In this paper we propose a methodology to measure the characteristics and composition of intermediate products using productivity indicators based on directional distance functions. We evaluate how quality attributes interact with the quantity level in grapes production, and find evidence of a...