We analyze growth and diversification of U.S. dairy farms by examining changes in ten size cohorts and new entrants through three successive censuses. We reject Gibrat’s law and the mean reversion hypothesis of growth. Growth rates appear bimodal where the smallest and largest farm cohorts...

We estimate a model of suppression productivity for individual fires, where suppression productivity is measured in terms of the reduction in the estimated market value of wildfire losses. Estimation results show that at the margin, every dollar increase in suppression costs reduces resource...

Wind erosion and blowing dust are major problems for traditional tillage winter wheat-summer fallow in eastern Washington. Wind erosion reduces soil productivity and dust particulates are a major air quality concern. Conservation tillage summer fallow can reduce wind erosion markedly, but is...

An Operational Approach for Evaluating Investment Risk: An Application to the No-Till Transition Abstract: Roy’s safety-first rule is used to provide measures popular with farmers of short and long term business risk associated with various no-till transition strategies over an investment...

Determining the impacts on consumers of government policies affecting the demand for food products requires a theoretically consistent micro-level demand model. We estimate a system of demands for weekly city-level dairy product purchases by nonlinear three stage least squares to account for...

There has been a shift in fiscal policies in developing countries with good quality institutions. Government spending is less likely to be procyclical and instead countercyclical where spending rises during times of recession and falls during times of expansion to reduce the effects of the...

We develop a theoretical model that elucidates the relationship between the quality of governance, composition of government spending and pollution as a by-product of the consumption process. We find that a shift in government spending towards goods that alleviate market failure increases...

We examine factors affecting entry and contribution to an association that provides different goods using social capital formed by heterogeneous firms in a political economy environment. We model and solve a game that explains investments to form social capital within associations and determine...

We examine an entry-deterrence model in the commons. We investigate in which contexts the presence of asymmetric information among the fi?rms exploiting the commons becomes welfare improving, relative to complete information, and in which settings an uninformed regulator might have incentives to...

The objective of this report is to take stock of the activities, motivations, impacts and challenges faced by the farms in Washington as they relate to agritourism and direct marketing. We characterize the agritourism entrepreneurship and direct marketing activities in different counties of the...