Comparative advantage motivates large trade flows in feeder animals throughout the world. Trade creates externalities when animal diseases can spread beyond the purchasing farm. When growers can choose between open and closed production systems, Nash equilibrium will likely involve socially...

Monotonicity of the likelihood ratio for conditioned densities is a common technical assumption in economic models. But we have found no empirical tests for its plausibility. This paper develops such a test based on the theory of order-restricted inference, which is robust with respect to the...

The feeder animal price is a derivative in the sense that its value depends upon the price of animals for the consumption market. It also depends upon the biological growth technology and feed costs. Daily maintenance costs are of particular interest to the husbander because they can be avoided...

Some long-term marketing contracts in the North American hog sector provide for price-dependent loan agreements at low rates. We show that these provisions linking pricing with financing are hybrids between forward rate agreements and commodity options. This observation presents approaches for...

Livestock policies in the European Community (EC) are explained and analyzed. Then we provide a review of the literature on models that attempt to explain livestock production and meat demand in the EC.

A large empirical literature exists seeking to identify crop yield distributions. Consensus has not yet formed. This is in part because of data aggregation problems but also in part because no satisfactory motivation has been forwarded in favor of any distribution, including the normal. This...

Worried by rapidly increasing milk and beef policy costs, but constrained by political considerations, the European Community (EC) Council of Agriculture ministers introduced a milk quota regime effective April 1984. The extent to which a quota regime reduces economic efficiency and influences...

A prominent facet of recent changes in agriculture has been the advent of precision breeding techniques. Another has been an increase in the level of information inputs and outputs associated with agricultural production. This paper identifies ways in which these features may complement in...

A dynamic multicountry, multicommodity model is used to evaluate the impact of a moderate General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) agreement. The terms of this agreement are as follows. 1) Export subsidy quantities (using annual and price wedges) are reduced by 50 percent from the 1986-88...

Site-specific management of inputs in agricultural production is receiving increased attention because of new technologies and concerns about excessive input use. This paper provides a microeconomic analysis of its implications. It shows that profit decreases with an increase in the variability...