Recent food price increases reportedly caused significant numbers of households to fall into poverty, particularly in the developing world. Most research into the welfare effects of these food price changes assumes constant demand or approximates second order substitution effects. Poverty...

Diversification into high-value cash crops among smallholders has been propagated as a strategy to improve welfare in rural areas. However, the extent to which cash crop production spurs projected gains remains an under-researched question, especially in the context of market imperfections...

The quaids ado files written by Brian Poi provide a good template for constructing alternative ado files for maximum likelihood estimation of demand systems. I describe how I used the template to construct ado files to estimate a five commodity almost ideal demand system with demographic...

In a June, 2009 American Economic Review article entitled "Tricks with Hicks: The EASI Demand System", Arthur Lewbel and Krishna Pendakur proposed the exact affine Stone index demand system. This system allows Engel curve behavior higher than rank 3, demographics, and unobserved heterogeneity in...

Exporting has always been thought of as one tool to improve productivity and, consequently, to spur economic growth in low- to middle-income economies. However, empirical evidence of this so-called 'learning-by-exporting' effect has been limited. This article determines whether...

Agricultural commercialization, or the transition from food to cash crops, has gained increasing attention over the past few decades. Plans for developing world farmers to focus on labor-intensive cash crops, to exploit their natural comparative advantage, typically depend on stable food markets...

This paper investigates the impact of USDA crop production reports in corn and soybean futures markets. The analysis is based on all corn and soybean production reports released over 1970-2006. The empirical analysis compares the typical OLS event study approach to the new Identification by...

Mean-variance analysis in the form of risk programming has a long, productive history in agricultural economics research. And risk programming continues to be used despite well known theoretical results that choices based on mean-variance analysis are not consistent with choices based on...