Estimating how the use of production contracts affects farm productivity is difficult when unobservable factors are correlated with both the decision to contract and productivity. To account for potential selection bias, this study uses the local availability of production contracts as an...

When using a willingness-to-pay (WTP) format in contingent valuation (CV) to value water-shed restoration, respondents may protest by questioning why they should pay to clean up a pollution problem that someone else created. Using a sample selection interval data model based on Bhat (1994) and...

Using data from a survey of Pennsylvania food processors, we investigate what firm-level characteristics make a processor more or less likely to buy agricultural inputs and ingredients though contracts. We find that over 20 percent of Pennsylvania processors use contracts, and over 44 percent of...

A key organizational decision for retailers is whether to self-distribute or rely on a wholesaler-supplied network and yet little is known about the impact of this strategic choice on store-level productivity. We estimate a stochastic frontier model for food retailers that accounts for...

A key organizational decision for retailers is whether to self-distribute or rely on a wholesaler-supplied network and yet little is known about the impact of this strategic choice on store-level productivity. We estimate a stochastic frontier model for food retailers that accounts for...