This paper investigates the determinants of participation and performance of tobacco contract farmers, and the effects of participation on overall crop and household incomes in the Zambezi Valley of Mozambique. We test the existence of threshold effects in land holdings and educational...

Regarding the nature of yield data, there are two basic characteristics that needs to be accommodated while we are about to model a yield distribution. The first one is the nonstationary nature of the yield distribution, which causes the heteroscedasticity related problems. The second one is the...

Agricultural support payments that cause no or minimal production distortions are exempt from World Trade Organization restrictions. If and how much decoupled payments, such as direct payments in the U.S., affect agricultural production remains an open empirical question with implications for...

Options on agricultural futures are popular financial instruments used for agricultural price risk management and to speculate on future price movements. Poor performance of Black’s classical option pricing model has stimulated many researchers to introduce pricing models that are more...

This paper seeks to understand the main sources of uncertainty in assessing the impacts of climate change on agricultural output, international trade, and poverty. We incorporate biophysical uncertainty by sampling from a distribution of productivity shocks reflecting the impacts of climate on...

Technology and innovation play an increasingly important role in the economic development of both developed and developing countries. We investigate how policy and market factors influence firms’ (or other potential innovators’) decisions on innovation or imitation by developing a conceptual...

The Neoclassical theory of production establishes a dual relationship between the profit value function of a competitive firm and its underlying production technology. This relationship, usually referred to as the duality theory, has been widely used in empirical work to estimate production...

An important issue in the agricultural actuarial literature is the extent to which sample period selection affects the accuracy of insurance rating. A conditional Weibull distribution approach is developed which explicitly models the interaction of weather, technology, and other variables...

Experimental auction and discrete choice experiment are two popular value elicitation methods.Theoretically they should yield the same results but empirical results have been mixed (e.g.,Lusk and Schroeder 2004, 2006; Corrigan et al. 2010.) This study uses both methods todetermine consumers’...

It is generally believed that preprocessing procedure can reduce the transportation and storage costs of biomass feedstock for biofuel production by condensing the feedstock’s size. However, the capital costs of preprocessing facilities could be significant in the feedstock logistics system....