Infectious livestock disease creates externalities for proximate animal production enterprises. The distribution of production scale within a region should influence and be influenced by these disease externalities. Taking the distribution of the unit costs of stocking an animal as primitive, we...

The efficiency of redistribution and the level of government costs of revenue assurance are compared with current farm programs. The results suggest that a revenue assurance program that uses a fixed base acreage and actual or county average yields to assure whole farm revenues could provide a...

Pigouvian taxes are typically imposed in situations where there is imperfect knowledge on the extent of damage caused by a producing firm. A regulator imposing imperfectly informed Pigouvian taxes may cause the firms that should (should not) produce to shut down (produce). In this paper we use a...

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...

We develop a dynamic capital valuation model in which each farm can take an action with farm-varying cost to increase the probability of not contracting a disease. In the presence of infection externalities, circumstances are identified under which multiple equilibria exist and where the one...

Based on the Ricardian rent theory, this study employs the variable profit function to analyze the determinants of Iowa cropland cash rental rates using county-level panel data from 1987 to 2005. Accounting for spatial and temporal autocorrelations, responses of local cash rental rates to...

The U.S. market in subsidized commodity revenue insurance contracts has expanded rapidly since 1996. By far the most prevalent contract forms are crop-specific, rather than the whole-farm design which has a better claim to being optimal. For an arbitrary acre allocation vector, this paper...

Finisher hog production in North America has seen a shift toward larger production units and contract-organized production since circa 1990. Given the efficiency gains and conversion costs associated with contract production, growers may have to choose between long term commitment through...

Based on the Ricardian rent theory, this study employs the variable profit function to analyze the determinants of Iowa cropland cash rental rates using county-level panel data from 1987 to 2005. Accounting for spatial and temporal autocorrelations, responses of local cash rental rates to...

Corn markets are important for many industries. These include the seed, fertilizer, meat production/processing and agricultural machinery sectors, all of which are highly concentrated. Oligopoly theory suggests that corn input and field equipment suppliers likely benefit from policies that...