Optimal entry and exit thresholds for Georgia commercial peach production are calculated when both price and yield follow a Brownian motion process. The thresholds are based on an irreversible sunk-cost investment model, where revenue from peach production is affected by the timing of when to...

Stochastic frontier analysis is used to determine the relative efficiency of firms in the food industry in industrialized countries. Using panel data analysis, the firm-specific factors, firm size, the corporate tax rate and number of years of operation and country-specific effects as potential...

The US Environmental Protection Agency announced a waiver allowing an increase in the Fuel-Ethanol blend limit (the “blend wall” ) from 10% (E10) to 15% (E15) on October,2010.Justifications for the waiver are reduced vehicle fuel prices and less consumption of petroleum gasoline, leading to...

Since the beginning of this century, China’s annual GDP growth is over 9%. This growth is fueled by large increases in energy consumption, led by a coal-dominated energy structure, and associated with higher sulfur dioxide emissions and industry dust. In 2008, China accounted for over 17% of...

This study examines the interaction between insurance, credit and liquidity constraints using a stochastic dynamic model. A risk averse farmer whose objective is to manage both production and market risk is assumed to maximize the expected utility of life-time consumption by using both area...

This paper presents a dynamic crop rotation model that shows how crop yield and price volatility could impact crop mix and acreage response under crop rotation considerations. Specifically, a discrete Markov decision model is utilized to optimize producers’ crop rotation decision within a...

The objective of this study is to compare the effects of climate change on crop yields across different regions. A Principal Component Regression (PCR) model is developed to estimate the historical relationships between weather and crop yields for corn, soybeans, cotton, and peanuts for several...

In this paper, a dynamic optimization model was developed to simulate how farm-level realized price and profitability respond to yield change which was induced by climate change. Producers' acreage response was included in the dynamic model considering crop rotation effect. In the crop rotation...

In this study, a Structural Vector Autoregression model (SVAR) is employed to decompose how supply/demand structural shocks affect food and fuel prices within fuel and corn markets. Results indicate that the relative importance of each structural shock in explaining the variation of corn prices...