Reducing the incidence of listeriosis from contaminated food has significant social health benefits, but reduction requires the use of additional or higher quality inputs at higher costs. We estimate the impact of three inputs in a food processing plant on the prevalence of L. monocytogenes...

This paper identifies factors affecting the distribution of farm income among dairy producers over time. Using data from participants in Cornell's Dairy Farm Record Program, we decompose differences of farm income distributions into those due to: differences in means of observable farm...

This paper explores the role of management ability in explaining efficiency on New York dairy farms. Using an unbalanced panel of farm data from 1993 through 2004, we estimate input and output-oriented technical efficiencies, cost efficiencies and revenue efficiencies using stochastic frontier...

The Dixit entry/exit real option model was applied to the entry/exit decisions of New York dairy farmers. For the cost structure of a 500-cow farm the entry milk price is $17.52 per hundredweight (cwt.) and the exit milk price is $10.84. For the 50-cow farm cost structure the entry price is...

Decomposition methods suggest major contributors to variability in returns to New York dairy farms are purchased feed quantities and milk production; milk price variability contributes substantially less. Decomposing the Gini measure of income inequality indicates that milk revenues and...

Agricultural studies have often differentiated and estimated different technologies within a sample of farms. The common approach is to use observable farm characteristics to split the sample into several groups and subsequently estimate different functions for each group. Alternatively, unique...

The empirical impact of rBST was measured for 211 dairy farms using 1993-95 data. Farms applying rBST on roughly half of their herds saw, on average, a net increase of about 1,300 pounds of milk per cow per year. The impact on profits, was, however, not statistically different from zero.

In a competitive market dairy production will shift to that region which is the most productive. Thus, this paper reports the measurement of productivity of dairy production in the various states of the U.S. using recent Census data and non-parametric Malmquist index techniques. These are total...

We formulate a method to determine an equitable division of dairy farm partnership income when partners provide unequal amounts of capital, labor, and management and empirically estimate this relationship. New York dairy farm financial data are used within fixed effects and random coefficient...

Infectious diseases play a critical role in determining the profitability of individual farms and maintaining the viability of livestock industries, international trade, and trade policies. Thus, it is critical to analyze the economic consequences of infectious diseases, and the effects of...