The industrialization of agriculture refers to the continued consolidation of farms and to the growing use of production and marketing contracts and vertical integration among input suppliers, lenders, agricultural producers, processors, and distributors of food and fiber products, domestically...

Signaling is an important element in the lender-borrower relationship that influences the cost and availability of debt capital to agricultural borrowers. This paper analyzes the effects of signaling on farm capital structure in conjunction with the pecking order and trade-off theories. The...

The study addresses problems in measuring credit risk under the structure model, and then proposes a seemingly unrelated regression model (SUR) to predict farms’ ability in meeting their current and anticipated obligations in the next 12 months. The empirical model accounts for both the...