Conventional estimates of the economic return to agricultural research use market prices for the values of products and inputs; on this basis, economic rates of return are typically well above the cost of capital, suggesting that more investment in research would be socially desirable. But these...

Since the early 1970s there has been interest in the application of optimal control theory to the management of economic systems. Specifically, optimal control theory prescribes policy strategies which optimise a quantifiable policy preference function subject to market equilibrium conditions....

The objective of this paper is to test the hypothesis that farmer perceptions of technology- specific characteristics significantly condition technology adoption decisions. Earlier adoption studies have not considered this in the analysis of the determinants of adoption decisions. The omission...

Rapid institutional innovation in the 1980's has led to problems that exceed the scope of research normally assumed by individual researchers. During such periods of rapid change, subject-matter research may be particularly useful. This paper reviews research on the Federal Agricultural Mortgage...

The paper develops and illustrates the application of criteria for ranking risky investment alternatives that are based on their certainly equivalent (cE) outcomes and determines expressions for approximating the cE outcomes by means of the central moments of their distribution. The paper...

A shadow-price profit frontier model is developed to examine production efficiency of Chinese rural households in farming operations. The model incorporates price distortions resulting from imperfect market conditions and socioeconomic and institutional constraints, but retains the advantages of...

In this paper I improve Gardner's surplus transformation curve framework by assuming that governments are able to vary many policy instruments simultaneously instead of only one. I use my framework to find the combination of the currently used instruments which provides the most efficient income...

Leathers (1991) shows that while the existence of allocable fixed inputs can cause joint production (as in Shumway, Pope and Nash, 1984), it will not necessarily lead to joint production. The extent to which allocable fixed inputs cause joint production in agriculture is an empirical question....

A fairly comprehensive range of planting choices made by maize farmers in Kenya (including discrete endogenous variables creating self-selectivity) is modelled and estimated as one system of interrelated decisions. Two-stage and three-stage probit procedures are used to handle the simultaneity...