While controversy surrounds skewness attributes of typical yield distributions, a better understanding is important for agricultural policy assessment and for crop-insurance rate setting. Day (1965) conjectured that crop yield skewness declines with an increase in nitrogen use at low levels but...

The spatial dimension of agricultural production is important when a communicable disease enters a region. This paper considers two sorts of biosecurity risk that producers can seek to protect against. One concerns the risk of  spread: that neighboring producers do not take due care in...

Often, a single production process gives rise to a mass distribution of quality levels. If prices vary with quality, then input use is determined by interactions between the production-quality-input use relationship and the price-quality relationship. Using the dominance methods, the way in...

Industrial processing emphasizes information on and control over quality of raw materials. This letter establishes conditions under which informed control involves ensuring uniformity in inputs and increased uniformity encourages more extensive processing. The Boltzmannï¾–Shannon entropy...

Price-dependent loan agreements at low interest rates have sometimes been included in North American hog sector long-term marketing contracts. We show that a general form of this stipulation can be viewed as a hybrid between a forward rate agreement and a bundle of commodity spot options. In...

Milk production is seasonal in many European countries. While quantity seasonality poses capacity management problems for dairy processors, a European Union policy goal is to reduce price seasonality. After developing a model of endogenous seasonality, we study the effects of three E.U. policies...

Previous studies disagree on the effects of insurance on fertilizer application rates. The effect of increased fertilizer on the probability of low yields primarily determines whether fertilizer and insurance are substitutes or complements. The authors estimate conditional distributions of corn...

Conventional classroom analysis of technology adoption in a monopoly neglects some important situations. A more comprehensive analysis provides the instructor with opportunities to present some critical economic concepts. By permitting intersecting cost functions, one can show why innovations...

The typical firm produces for sale a plural number of distinct product lines. This paper characterizes the composition of a firm?s optimal production vector as a function of cost and revenue function attributes. The approach taken applies mathematical group theory and revealed preference...