Replaced with revised version of paper 07/11/06.

Households plan strategically for facing risks associated with livelihood security. Choosing a particular set of coping strategies depends on a number of factors including the types of crisis households face and options available. Often, poor households risk future income generating capacity for...

This paper develops a game-theoretic model of heterogeneous consumers to analyze the effect of cooperative involvement on quality-enhancing product innovation activity, the pricing of food products, and the welfare of the groups involved in the context of a mixed duopoly where an openmembership...

Most existing economic analyses of optimal groundwater management use single-cell aquifer models, which assume that an aquifer responds uniformly and instantly to groundwater pumping. This paper demonstrates how spatially explicit aquifer response equations from the water resources engineering...

This paper uses plant-level micro-data from the 2002 Census of Manufactures, Food Safety Inspection Service, and the Economic Research Service in a translog cost function to examine the costs of effort devoted to the performance of sanitation and process control tasks and levels of food safety...

A subsidized savings accounts program is being considered by USDA's Risk Management Agency to provide an income safety net to farmers. We argue that savings accounts would complement federal crop insurance program and other private risk management strategies that farmers routinely adopt to...

Land reforms in India were aimed at securing access to land for poor rural households. We use data from West Bengal to highlight the impact of the state’s 1978 land reform program on human capital accumulation within the beneficiary households. The results from the study indicate that reform...

This paper examines the changes in nutritional behavior of Russian adults over the ten-year transition period, between 1994 and 2004. We present evidence on the impact of individual as well as regional characteristics on changes in fat, protein, alcohol and cigarette consumption, and on...