The 1991 Latvia household budget survey provided data for establishing basic information about food consumption levels and patterns in Latvia during the first year of major economic reforms. This study evaluates one aspect of economic decision making of households: how income is allocated for...

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.

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...

We study the determinants of somatic cell count (SCC) for fluid milk among U.S. dairies. We synthesize much of the work that has been done to model SCC economically in order to identify the potential impacts of buyer-imposed penalties and incentives within the supply chain. Additionally we...

The popularity of AIDS may not easily extend to censored demand systems. We propose an incomplete demand system that has relatively few restrictions on the parameter space, but preserves its theoretical consistency and apply this model to Indonesian data that have significant proportion of...

Estimated Indonesian backyard and commercial broiler output supply and input demands from normalized quadratic function satisfy all theoretical properties (homogeneity, reciprocity, adding-up, symmetry, curvature). Elasticities have correct signs and are significant. Very inelastic supply...

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...

The appearance of organic produce is often less than perfect because of limited methods of avoiding plant diseases. We combine hypothetical and real auction mechanisms to investigate how cosmetic damage affects consumers’ willingness to pay for apples. We find that 75% of the participants...