Agricultural industries in small geographical areas with limited acreage tend to be overlooked by those not associated with the growing region or industry. Sugarbeets continue to be produced in a relatively small geographic area and with relatively limited acreage in North Dakota and Minnesota....

The measurement of productivity fluctuations has been the focus of decades-long interest. In addition to broad structural forces driving productivity changes, there is more recent interest in measuring and identifying the heterogeneous forces driving these changes. A major force is...

This study uses a unique firm-level dataset to examine how falling trade costs from 1993-2001 affected entry, exit, productivity, and exporting in the Korean manufacturing sector. We verify many of the predictions of recent heterogeneous-firm models of international trade. For example, falling...

A changing world of increasing complexity, fluctuating prices, high energy costs and limited data necessitate creative blending of economic theory and available empirical statistics to understand the welfare impacts in a specific market. In this paper, a programming approach is used in tandem...

The increasing use of production contracts in the hog sector has reduced the number of spot market transactions, raised concerns about price manipulation and helped to spur legislation requiring price reporting by packers. Using data from the 2002 and 2007 Censuses of Agriculture, this study...

In recent decades there has been a substantial increase in the scale of production and the use of production contracts in the hog sector. This paper explores empirically whether these two phenomena are related by examining whether the use of production contracts has allowed finish hog operations...

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In recent decades the northwestern part of Germany (Weser-Ems region) has come to focus on intensive pork production. This has led to public outrage about the disposal of biological waste, farmers’ complaints about the high cost of leasing land, soaring risks of animal diseases, and the...

Western-European consumers have become not only more demanding on product availability in retail outlets but also on other food attributes such as quality, integrity, and safety. When (re)designing food supply-chain networks, from a logistics point of view, one has to consider these demands next...