There has been considerable interest recently in alternative cropping opportunities for US grain producers. One crop that has received significant interest has been industrial hemp. Hemp production has essentially been non-existent in the US since the 1950's. The purpose of this paper is to...

The Red de Proteccion Social (RPS) in Nicaragua is one of a growing number of conditional cash transfer programs that pay households cash stipends in exchange for school attendance and regular visits to health clinics. A key feature of these programs is that the cash is given to the woman head...

A system of equations representing corn supply, feed demand, export demand, food, alcohol and industrial (FAI) demand, and corn price is estimated by three-stage least squares. A price dependent reduced form equation is then formed to investigate the effect of ethanol production on the national...

The intent of the applied research reported in this paper is to examine the relationship between growth and the fiscal health of a subset of local governments (incorporated cities) over the last decade. While any number of researchers has raised this question, the literature has tended to focus...

This paper reviews three arguments why government should not directly finance public goods provision in the countryside: (1) sorting and voting of residents leads to efficient local public goods provision, (2) community governance better copes with incomplete contracting in public goods, and (3)...

Spatial externalities can affect economic welfare and landscape pattern by linking farm returns on adjoining parcels of land. While policy can be informed by research that documents spatial externalities, statistically quantifying the presence of externalities from landscape pattern is...

The intent of this study is to review the current strengths and weaknesses of the retail and services industries of Jefferson County. We use historical data to look for overall trends and 2004 county sales tax data to provide detailed insights.

In this paper, a two-period game is constructed, where duopoly firms choose advertising strategies in the first period and compete in price or quantity in the second period by maximizing the value of firm equity. Using certainty equivalence, we demonstrate the impacts of uncertainty and modes of...

This paper investigates the determinants of efficiency and technological progress at US research universities. It relies on a unique panel data set of multiple outputs and inputs from 92 universities covering the period 1981-1998. Over that time span, US universities experienced large increases...

This paper examines the role of two types of reputation - borrower credit history and productivity - in disequilibrium supply and demand models of loan size dynamics in formal and informal credit markets. Using panel data on Honduran households, full- and partialinformation regime switching...