Internet use has grown rapidly over the last 15 years and so has its integration into the rural economy. Connecting to the Internet via high-speed technology such as DSL lines, cable, satellite, and wireless networks increases bandwidth and makes the Internet much more useful to businesses,...

Replaced with revised version of paper 09/22/09.

Replaced with revised version of paper 04/20/10.

This paper provides quantitative estimates of the effect of proximity to fast food restaurants and grocery stores on obesity in urban food markets. Our empirical model combined georeferenced micro data on access to fast food restaurants and grocery stores with data about salient personal...

Yield variability can be significantly higher at the farm level than at more aggregated levels, including the county. However, due to a dearth of available farm level data, much stochastic analysis involving farm yields utilizes more aggregated yield data as a proxy for the farm level. We...

The study addresses problems in measuring credit risk under the structure model, and then proposes a seemingly unrelated regression model (SUR) to predict farms’ ability in meeting their current and anticipated obligations in the next 12 months. The empirical model accounts for both the...

The estimation of conditional probability distribution functions (PDFs) in a kernel nonparametric framework has recently received attention. As emphasized by Hall, Racine and Li (2004), these conditional PDFs are extremely useful for a range of tasks including modelling and predicting consumer...

This paper discusses the application of the equilibrium displacement model (EDM) to estimate ex-ante the welfare effects of biological productivity growth for semi-subsistence crop and its impact on poverty reduction. The conventionally used EDM is compared with an alternative model (alternative...

Discrete choice models are widely used in studies of recreation demand. They have proven valuable when modeling situations where decision makers face large choice sets and site substitution is important. However, when the choice set faced by the individual becomes very large (on the order of...