Using the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) modeling system, we investigate the multilateral removal of border taxes and farm programs and their distortion of world agricultural markets. We find that agricultural and trade distortions have significant terms-of-trade...

Suppose a farmer had to apply a herbicide pre-emergence or not at all. The advent of a herbicide-tolerance trait innovation then provides the option to wait for more information before making a state-contingent post-emergence application. This option to wait can increase or decrease average...

The U.S. market in subsidized commodity revenue insurance contracts has expanded rapidly since 1996. By far the most prevalent contract forms are crop-specific, rather than the whole-farm design which has a better claim to being optimal. For an arbitrary acre allocation vector, this paper...

It appears to be widely believed that returns on low quality land are more variable than on high quality land. Using Ricardian rent as the measure of returns and sensitivity to output price as the measure of volatility, we investigate this null hypothesis for three different measures of quality....

Replaced with revised version of paper 12/30/09.

In this paper, we introduce a game theoretic model of groundwater extraction in a two-cell aquifer under incomplete information. A novel assumption is that individual users have incomplete knowledge of the speed of lateral flows in the aquifer: although a user is aware that his neighbor's water...

This paper analyzes a game theoretic model of groundwater extraction in an asymmetric two-cell aquifer under incomplete information about the extent to which the local stock of groundwater depends on the extraction histories at nearby wells. A novel assumption is that the elevation of the bottom...

We investigate a basic question about a monopoly with incomplete information: when does the seller have an incentive to allow potential buyers to acquire more private information about their tastes for the seller's product? Under plausible conditions such as log-concave density of...

A result on the comparative statics of land rent under joint price and yield uncertainty and expected utility maximisation is provided. An increase in the strength of the negative price--yield dependence is modelled using the concordance stochastic order. The effect of a greater price--yield...

In a marketing environment, the demand conditions, the costs of shipping and storing grain varieties, the interest rate on farm loans, and the distribution of cropland in the area are important determinants of growers' planting decisions. In this article, I focus on a market for two...