California’s nursery and floral industry is the largest in the United States with a farm value for product sales totaling $3.78 billion in 2009. When floral and nursery product sales are combined, the industry ranks second among all California agricultural products, following the dairy...

In Markov-switching regression models, we use Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the true and candidate models to select the number of states and variables simultaneously. In applying Akaike information criterion (AIC), which is an estimate of KL divergence, we find that AIC retains too...

This dissertation examines the impacts of distance-dependent spatial externalities on patterns of economic activity in a free-market setting. This class of externalities, which include such examples as smog dispersal, pesticide drift, and habitat degradation from roads, are referred to as...

Organic vegetable farms on the Central Coast region of California are generally intensive operations. That is, two and sometimes three crops may be harvested off the same acreage each year. Many approaches exist for rowing and marketing organic vegetables. This publication describes the range of...