Coastal coral reefs, especially in the Florida Keys, are declining at a disturbing rate. Marine ecologists and reef scientists have emphasized the importance of establishing nonmarket values of coral reefs to assess the cost effectiveness of coral reef management and remediation programs. The...

Stochastic frontier analysis is used to determine the relative efficiency of firms in the food industry in industrialized countries. Using panel data analysis, the firm-specific factors, firm size, the corporate tax rate and number of years of operation and country-specific effects as potential...

Farmer's willingness to voluntarily reduce insecticide use is not considered when regulatory approaches to environmental protection are proposed. Regulations that require behavior that would voluntarily be undertaken are excessive and economically inefficient. Using survey data from a contingent...

We develop a flexible model to examine competitive conditions in the food retailing industry based on the Box-Cox transformation of the demand and industry equilibrium conditions. The impact of key technological and market developments on shifts in the competitive index is examined. Adoption of...

Peanut meal is cross-hedged with soybean meal using peanut meal cash prices and soybean meal futures prices. Hedge rations are obtained for short- vs. long-term data sets. Evaluation indicates positive gains for cross-hedged poultry/peanut producers, and that soybean meal futures can be used as...

Notwithstanding substantial federal financial support for the export promotion of agricultural products, ways to improve the efficiency of federal funding have not been discussed in empirical research. In this study, an equilibrium displacement framework was developed to evaluate whether the...

Stochastic frontier analysis is employed for a comparison of value-added and traditional measures of performance. Results indicate value-added measures are not significantly different from traditional measures of performance and thus little if any information is gained by replacing traditional...

Fixed search costs associated with locating and purchasing pecans invalidate the Tobit model. Factors such as perceived quality, ease of purchase, and familiarity with marketing outlets influence the fixed costs of pecan purchases. These factors have differing impacts on the probability of...