Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), a piece of US tax law that allows for tax-deferred exchanges of like-kind property. Design/methodology/approach: The paper derives a theoretical premium value for exchanges and presents...

The ecosystem service concept has been proposed as a meaningful framework for natural resource management. In theory it holds concomitant benefit and consequence for the forest product sector. However, numerous barriers impede practitioners from developing concrete and enduring responses to...

This paper starts with the basic premise: that conventional measures of productivity growth - - -often used as a measure of corporate performance - - -which ignore external or social output, are biased. We then construct an alternative productivity growth measure using activity analysis which...

The Environmental Protection Agency requires concentrated animal feeding operations to develop and implement a comprehensive nutrient management plan. Changes in manure management to meet nutrient application standards will increase production costs. Some of these costs can be offset by savings...

Water quality trading between point and nonpoint sources is of great interest as an alternative to strict command and control regulations on point sources for achieving water quality goals. The expectation is that trading will reduce the costs of water quality protection, and may speed...

We estimate how much United States farms changed enterprise diversification in response to a marked increase in crop insurance coverage brought about by the 1994 Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act, which substantially increased insurance subsidies. The analysis exploits farm-level panel census...

This study presents evidence that contracting is positively associated with the scale of production for six major U.S. agricultural commodities. Specifically, contract producers tend to operate at a larger scale than do independent producers, and the likelihood of an operation contracting...

Allocations of research funds across programs are often made for efficiency reasons. Social science research is shown to have small, lagged but significant effects on U.S. agricultural efficiency when public agricultural R&D and extension are simultaneously taken into account. Farm management...

In the United States the 1996 agricultural policy reform ushered in market-oriented farm policies and also gave farmers a seven-year lump-sum payment that was not tied to production. Some scholars argue that farm program payments have changed the distribution of income among farm households. Our...

We used data collected for the National Animal Health Monitoring Systems' (NAHMS) National Swine Survey to estimate the number and associated opportunity costs of piglet mortalities to producers of various herd sizes and in various regions of the United States in 1990. Opportunity costs are the...