A framework is developed to examine organic crop insurance established by the Risk Management Agency (RMA). Given that the RMA links organic and conventional crop prices, the model is calibrated to reflect both markets to illustrate the impacts that pricing has on insurance coverage. Findings...

This paper uses conditional quantile regression to analyze the effects of genetically modified (GM) seed technology and management on production risk in agriculture, with an application to the distribution of corn yield in Wisconsin. Using the certainty equivalent (CE) as a welfare measure, our...

Industry cluster identification methods determine linkages between purchasers and suppliers at the county level for 447 economic sectors in Tennessee. Using an econometric model, the cluster analysis is extended to estimate which value chains contributed to economic growth between 2001 and 2006....

County-level yield data are used in applied research and crop insurance policy in place of farmlevel yield data, which are likely sparse, not broadly representative, and subject to selection bias. We exploit the fact that county-level yields are the aggregate of farm-level yields to derive...

We develop a theoretical model of optimal licensing schemes for quality-improving innovations. We consider an oligopolistic market where two downstream firms compete in price and the upstream innovator holds a technology that may create differentiation between the products. Our results show that...

Homegrown value-auction experiments are useful for exploring preferences for controversial product attributes. These auctions have emphasized estimating the effect of the attribute on the willingness to pay (WTP) for a product. The likelihood that individuals are willing to purchase any products...

In nonmetropolitan areas of the United States, single-mother families contain a majority of children living below the poverty line. Changes between 1992 and 2000 in the economic well-being of nonmetropolitan single-mother families are examined using kernel density estimation and density...

Economists, including agricultural economists, have a long history of recognizing the importance of the behavioral foundations in decision making while ignoring these observable human dimensions in their economic models. The economics of social capital and trust, two important human...

Economists tend to focus on monetary incentives. In the model developed here, both sociological and economic incentives are used to diminish the apparent moral hazard problem existing in commodity grading. Training that promotes graders' response to sociological incentives is shown to increase...

This paper investigates factors that impact marketing performance in the Canadian wheat market. Using data provided by the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) for six crop years, results indicate that producers were not able to profitably use all marketing contracts offered by the CWB, earlier pricing...