The development of grain-based ethanol production in Kansas has had a marked impact upon the feedgrain and livestock industries of the state. The increased focus on feedgrain production stemming from ethanol development impacts the use and sustainability of Kansas water resources, and has...

This paper studies the divergence in the planning and equilibrium solutions for a multicell aquifer with heterogeneity in cell depths. A spatial model is developed that explicitly accounts for the lateral movement of water between cells. The optimal planning problem maximizes the discounted...

This paper addresses two issues pertaining to the market differentiation between non-genetically modified and genetically modified food varieties. First, a cost-efficiency explanation of the discrepancy between the observed shares of identity preserved non-genetically modified variety and the...

There exists much uncertainty about consumer attitudes towards genetically modified foods. If it happens that sufficient (insufficient) acres are planted under non-modified seed to meet post-harvest demand, then a price premium will not (will) emerge for the non-modified varieties. A...

The U.S. market in subsidized commodity revenue insurance contracts has expanded rapidly since 1996. By far the most prevalent contract forms are crop-specific, rather than the whole-farm design which has a better claim to being optimal. For an arbitrary acre allocation vector, this paper...

It appears to be widely believed that returns on low quality land are more variable than on high quality land. Using Ricardian rent as the measure of returns and sensitivity to output price as the measure of volatility, we investigate this null hypothesis for three different measures of quality....

In this paper, we introduce a game theoretic model of groundwater extraction in a two-cell aquifer under incomplete information. A novel assumption is that individual users have incomplete knowledge of the speed of lateral flows in the aquifer: although a user is aware that his neighbor's water...