Graduate students frequently have difficulty defining, developing, and resolving research problems in a manner consistent with the agricultural economics community. We report on a seminar that focuses on professional dialogue to assist graduate students to integrate subject matter courses into...

Mean-variance analysis in the form of risk programming has a long, productive history in agricultural economics research. And risk programming continues to be used despite well known theoretical results that choices based on mean-variance analysis are not consistent with choices based on...

The purpose of this study is to analyze how the introduction of a downside risk measure and less restrictive assumptions can change the optimal hedge ratio in the standard hedging problem. Based on a dataset of futures and cash prices for soybeans in the U.S., the empirical findings indicate...

This paper develops a theoretically consistent behavioral model of farmer decision-making that allows for analysis of the relative impacts of the determinants of SSI value. The model departs from previous literature by assuming that SSI reduces uncertainty, but not eliminate it. Results show...

In this study, we evaluate the preference of consumers in Niger for different tuwo or couscous characteristics using conjoint analysis. Data were collected through a structured survey administered at 4 sites. Preferences are estimated for three products (couscous, fermented tuwo and nonfermented...

An alternative unconstrained expected-utility maximization model of farm debt is developed using the location-scale parameter condition that incorporates the empirically validated hypotheses of decreasing absolute and constant relative risk aversion. Simulation-optimization results based on the...

Graduate students frequently have difficulty defining, developing, and resolving research problems in a manner consistent with the agricultural economics community. Here, we report on a seminar designed to assist graduate students integrate subject matter courses into independent research...

We investigate the comparative static effects of environmental and agricultural policies on pesticide and fertilizer use. Since such effects depend on technology and risk preference parameters, we estimate these from a panel data set of Illinois farms. Generalized method of moments is used on a...

Our initial findings indicate that GM crops do not contribute to the decline of traditional family farms. We make a significant methodological impact by using the within transformation to remove unobserved individual effects and demonstrate that the within transformation results in ML estimates...

Significant ambiguity surrounds the magnitude and sign of the effect of foreign aid on economic growth. Foreign aid can potentially augment scarce domestic capital to spur growth but foreign aid can also remove positive incentive to build wealth, stalling growth. This paper characterizes the...