America’s agricultural producers continue to age. According to the U.S. Census of Agriculture, the average age of farm operators increased from 55.3 in 2002 to 57.1 in 2007. During the same period, the Census shows a thirty percent decrease in the number of farmers under the age of 25. Young...

Productive utilization of resources has enabled American agriculture to supply the nation with vast quantities of food at a high level of efficiency. However, the USDA shows that 2011 pesticide expenses increased by about $100 million resulting from a slight increase of planted acres and a...

Inuential individuals in a social network environment are important in shaping preferences for new products. In this study, we adopt an incentive compatible choice-based conjoint analysis approach to generate data on the introduction of a new ice cream product. We use spatial econometric methods...

This study uses an agricultural household model to examine the tradeoff between farm profitability and a household head’s desire for market work. The theoretical analysis is a comparative statics analysis relative to the two variables. Results show that the tradeoff can arise for...

This paper investigates the effect of land fragmentation on farm efficiency in Kosovo utilising agricultural household survey data. To recognise heterogeneity among agricultural production systems in Kosovo, we estimate the technology separately for different groups or “classes” of farms,...

This paper analyzes the theoretical underpinnings of producers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for novel inputs. In addition to conceptualizing the WTP function for producers, we derive its comparative statics and demonstrate the use of these properties to estimate input quantities demanded, outputs...

This paper compares environmental and profitability outcomes for a centralized biorefinery for cellulosic ethanol that does all processing versus a biorefinery linked to a decentralized array of local depots that pretreat biomass into concentrated briquettes. The analysis uses a spatial...

There is a large literature which investigates the relationship between market concentration and innovation. It is difficult to find a suitable measure for innovative output. We use a rich dataset based on university trials of corn hybrids to estimate, using fixed effects, a production function....

In this paper, we contribute to the existing literature of global yield gap analysis by using geo-spatial dataset on crop yields, agro-climatic factors and selected socio-economic variables. In line with the literature, we link yield gaps to technical efficiencies. By treating each grid-cell as...

Perennial crop production is inherently dynamic due to several salient physical characteristics including an establishment period of several years with low or no yields, long lives in commercial production (40 years or more), and path-dependence of yields on input use and other exogenous...