Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models are commonly used for global agricultural market analysis. Concerns are sometimes raised, however, about the quality of their output since key parameters may not be econometrically estimated and little emphasis is generally given to model assessment....

Technical dependencies as well as data constraints limit our ability to allocate inputs across sectors and hence our ability to measure sectoral productivity. We adapt a directional measure of efficiency to the measurement of sector-specific productivity that does not require allocating all...

This article investigates the relationship between international trade patterns and the global distribution of coarse grain production responses to market developments in the United States. Our null hypothesis is that world markets are fully integrated, rendering the geographic persistence of...

A highly disaggregated, “tariff line,” source-differentiated, partial equilibrium model of U.S. specialty cheese imports is developed to investigate reform options for tariff-rate quotas (TRQs). A mixed-complementarity framework is used to represent bilateral and most favored nation (MFN)...

This study analyzed the status of manufacturing capacity in the U.S. anhydrous ammonia industry (1971–91). Pindyck's (1988) real option model was extended to account for mean-reverting tendencies in the marketing margin to determine optimal capacity for each year. The key result of the study...

Recent analysis has highlighted agricultural land conversion as a significant debit in the greenhouse gas accounting of ethanol as an alternative fuel. A controversial element of this debate is the role of crop yield growth as a means of avoiding cropland conversion in the face of biofuels...

In this paper we seek to reconcile low farm-level substitution elasticity between nitrogen, fertilizer, and land, with larger industry-level values for the corn sector. This is accomplished with a micro-simulation model which identifies twenty-three heterogeneous groups of corn farmers based on...