Previous research has reached inconsistent, if not paradoxical, conclusions regarding the impact of conservation easements on farmland prices. Expectations of price reductions, strongly grounded in economic theory, are not always observed.We develop a hedonic model to examine the sale prices of...

The value of USDA reports has long been a question of interest for researchers and practitioners. However, the impact of announcements on comovements across related commodity prices has not been explored beyond financial asset markets. This is important because the structure of the relationship...

This paper determines the benefits and costs of firm-level advertising in a monopolistically competitive industry. The model is useful in an environment in which firm-level costs may be absent or imprecise. The empirical example uses data on the advertising for a new line of prune snacks by...

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...

Using farm-level data from the 1987, 1992, and 1997 Census of Agriculture, this study estimates what effect agricultural payments have had on the likelihood of farm business survival and on farm size. The unique panel data set permits conditioning current farm size on past farm size, which...

This survey paper explores the literature on decoupling of farm programs that has emerged in the last 10 years. The paper identifies and assesses the various channels of potential coupling of decoupled farm payments and provides a taxonomy of coupling mechanisms found in theoretical and...

Alternative techniques for representing dependencies among variables in multivariate simulation are discussed and compared in the context of rating a whole-farm insurance product. A procedure by lman and Conover (IC) that is common in actuarial applications is compared to a new technique...

Recently developed ethanol futures contracts now allow direct-hedging by ethanol producers. This study examines the effectiveness of one-through eight-week hedges between 2005 and 2008. Our findings show (a) ethanol inventory hedging effectiveness is significant for two-week and longer hedges,...

Significant differences exist in the rates of capital adjustment in the four major sectors of the U.S. economy: agriculture, food, manufacturing, and services. A multioutput adjustment cost model is specified to compute the rates of capital adjustment. This specification allows us to derive...

This article develops and estimates an explicit-factor Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) model in an endeavor to uncover (a) the systematic risk properties of returns to agricultural assets, (b) the relationship between agricultural returns and returns on comparable-risk nonagricultural assets, and...