A stochastic grain production frontier model is estimated on a representative sample of Ukrainian state farms. Technical inefficiency effects are modeled as a function of workforce composition, other farm-specific variables, and time. Technical inefficiency increased over time. Investment in...

Paper for presentation at the Northeastern Agricultural & Resource Economics Association’s Workshop on Economics and Child Nutrition Programs, AAEA & NAREA Joint Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 23, 2011.

The main objective of this paper is to identify factors that determine consumers’ purchase decisions for ground beef offered with different packaging technologies. Consumers’ increasing knowledge about food technologies and changes in food labeling regulation influence agribusiness’ future...

Considering most children spend a majority of their weekdays at school and, on average, obtain more than one-third of their daily caloric intake from meals consumed at school during the school year, school is a natural place to implement nutrition policies that would help develop healthy eating...

Recently enacted food safety regulations require processors to meet product standards for microbial contamination in meat products. An analysis of the cost-effectiveness of several technological interventions for microbial control in beef and pork processing shows that marginal improvements in...

The U.S. pork industry routinely adds antibiotics to rations of weaned pigs both to prevent illness before symptoms emerge and to increase growth rates. The European Union (EU) is in the process of restricting feed use of antibiotics, and the U.S. is currently reviewing the practice. The...

Paper for presentation at the Northeastern Agricultural & Resource Economics Association’s Workshop on Economics and Child Nutrition Programs, AAEA & NAREA Joint Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 23, 2011.

Consumers' preferences for meat quality attributes such as color influence their purchasing decisions. Better understanding of consumer preferences can help meat processors and others attain effective product development and marketing and inform public policy decisions on nutrition and food...

When using household-level data to examine consumer demand it is common to find that consumers purchase only a subset of the available goods, setting the demand for the remaining goods to zero. Ignoring such censoring of the dependent variables can lead to estimators with poor statistical...