Production risk from live weight variation of market pigs has become a more important concern in U.S. swine production. Packers are concerned about the variation in carcass size because of the demand for standardized cuts and the use of automation in the slaughter process. Swine producers care...

Malt barley is an important specialty crop in the Northern Plains and growers mitigate risk with federally subsidized crop insurance and production contracts. However, growers face considerable risk due to "“coverage gaps"” in crop insurance that result in uncertain indemnity payments due to...

This study assesses whether income constraints inhibit spending on fruits and vegetables among low-income households. If this is the case, then it is hypothesized that the distribution of expenditures on fruits and vegetables by low-income households should be stochastically dominated by the...

The economy of northwest Arkansas, including the Lincoln Lake watershed (a sub-watershed of the Illinois River), relies greatly upon livestock and poultry production. The supply of production by-products is increasingly under scrutiny as one of the potential sources of water pollution in the...

This dissertation contains three applications of time series in finance and macroeconomics. The first essay compares the cumulative returns for stocks and bonds atinvestment horizons from one to ten years by using a test for spatial dominance.Spatial dominance is a variation of stochastic...

In this paper, we propose a theoretical model to study the effect of income insecurity of parents and offspring on the child’s residential choice. Parents are partially altruistic toward their childrenand will provide financial help to an independent child when her income is low relative to...

American call and put options on the S&P 500 index futures that violate the stochastic dominance bounds of Constantinides and Perrakis (2007) over 1983-2006 are identified as potentially profitable investment opportunities. Call bid prices more frequently violate their upper bound than put bid...

The field of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) deals with the comparison of healthinterventions based on both costs and effectiveness (ability to improve health). Thisdissertation makes several methodological contributions to this area.Part I develops direct methods for computing mean costs and...