Theory and intuition tell us that the imposition of stringent environmental policies by a given country will reduce its net exports of commodities produced using pollution-intensive industries. It is therefore surprising that many empirical studies of international commodity trade have failed to...

The ethanol industry has expanded rapidly in recent times. Utilizing budgeted ethanol plant and farm models we determine the effect of this expansion on future corn acreage and farm incomes. Several scenarios are presented to determine the profitability of the ethanol industry at various input...

Americans are becoming more health conscious and more obese. The food industry attempts to capitalize on both of these current trends. In advance of government mandate, the dominant leader in the cracker industry introduced a trans fatty acid label to its products. The impact on demand of the...

Recognition of the potentially deleterious implications of high inequality of opportunity due to a biased asset distribution has led to increased interest in land reforms. However, little attention has been devoted to the potential longer-term impacts of the measures used to implement such...

Threshold autoregressive (TAR) models can accommodate the asymmetric cycling behavior observed in some time series data. This study develops a procedure to estimate TAR models when the conditional mean of the dependent variable is function of one or more exogenous factors while allowing for...

Replaced with revised version of paper 06/26/06.

Very little attention has been given to the modeling of yield distribution for crops and regions in which yields exhibit irregular behavior. We undertake a statistical case study of Texas upland cotton and propose an alternative mixture distribution based on regime-switching model in which the...

This study examines various market contracting combinations for Salinas Valley Head Lettuce Producers to determine the optimal combination. Currently 65% contracting is the industry standard. A stochastic farm simulation model is developed for a representative head lettuce producer in Salinas...

This study explores the prevalence and determinants of brand loyalty for agricultural input products. Results suggest that loyalty for both expendable and capital inputs is high among commercial farmers. Farmer attitudes, beliefs, and some demographic characteristics are useful identifiers of...

This paper uses Federal LandBank Data to examine loan characteristics and farm financial characteristics. Given that farm financial characteristics and loan interest rates can change, this paper examines if current farm financial characteristics can predict the current loan interest rate. In...