This report presents State-level soybean production cost and return estimates for the 1990 production year, along with coefficients of variation for each cost item. Per-acre costs are highly variable among States due to differences in production practices, inputs, and type and size of machines...

Systemic weather risk is a major obstacle for the formation of private (nonsubsidized) crop insurance. This paper explores the possibility of spatial diversification of insurance by estimating the joint occurrence of unfavorable weather conditions in different locations. For that purpose copula...

In this paper we specify and estimate producers’ risk preference using farm data. We allow heterogeneous risk preference across individuals and propose a specification to model the heterogeneity. We base farmers’ decision making on a utility maximization framework and incorporate both market...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...

This article reviews the current literature on USDA farm-level data reports and looks at the impact of information contained in the USDA Crop Production report on U.S., Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Wisconsin corn prices. A hypothesis is tested concerning the significance of the...

With the signing of the EU-ACP Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) in January 2009, Uganda as a member of the ACP, should endeavour to re-strategize itself to benefit from the opportunities such trading blocks create through increased trade. Trade is likely to increase with EPA in place and...

This paper investigates the impact of an expansion in agricultural processing on the Western Australian economy by modifying and applying a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) economic model of Western Australia (called WAM). WAM was used to simulate the effects of a $1 million expansion in...