This book examines social processes that have contributed to growing pesticide use, with a particular focus on the role governments play in urban aerial pesticide spraying operations. Beyond being applied to sparsely populated farmland, pesticides have been increasingly used in densely populated...

This study analyzes the perceptions, impacts, and rewards of farmers who adopted row planting for the production of teff as a result of being exposed to a technology promotion campaign for row planting of teff in the Oromia region of Ethiopia. Our three main findings are as follows. First,...

Economic models provide little insight into when the next big idea and its associated productivity dividend will come along. Once a general purpose technology (GPT) is identified, the economist's toolkit does provide an understanding when firms will adopt a new technology and for what purpose....

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wetland easement offers to North Dakota landowners from 1989 to 1998 had a 56% acceptance rate. Logit regression indicates that payment values, farm program certainty, participation history, and the quantity of deep wetlands all positively influenced acceptance....

Zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha) colonization of the eastern United States has resulted in expenditures of tens of millions of dollars spent by consumptive surface water users, in order to mitigate infrastructure impairment caused by this invasive species. Analogous to benefit-transfer...

We propose a two-dimensional Kalman filter approach that, additional to the information contained in futures prices evolution over time, makes use of information contained in the term structure of commodity futures along a second dimension of maturities. This time-maturity surface reflects a...

Net feed efficiency (NFE) technology is expected to improve the productivity of grazing systems in Australia's southern beef producing regions. The extended time path required for implementation of this genetic technology into commercial herds and the influence of climatic variability on the...

This paper provides a general framework for the quantitative analysis of stochastic dynamic models. We review convergence properties of some numerical algorithms and available methods to bound approximation errors. We then address convergence and accuracy properties of the simulated moments. Our...