Diminishing marginal utility (DMU) is neither necessary nor sufficient for downward-sloping demand. Yet, upper-division undergraduate and beginning graduate students often presumeotherwise. This paper provides two simple counter-examples that can be used to help students understand that the Law...

Economists estimating demand and supply systems face the question of using shares or quantities as dependent variables. This article finds that inconsistent estimates are obtained if one makes the wrong choice. A robust structure is presented to let the data choose the preferred form. Empirical...

We propose a Generalized Quadratic Utility (GQU) model for an incomplete demand system with binding non-negativity constraints which is flexible in income and price effects. The model accounts for zero consumption using choke prices identified by Kuhn-Tucker conditions. The GQU demand system can...

Diminishing marginal utility (DMU) is neither necessary nor sufficient for downward-sloping demand. Yet, upper-division undergraduate and beginning graduate students often presume otherwise. This paper provides two simple counter-examples that can be used to help students understand that the Law...

Duality methods for incomplete systems of consumer demand equations are adapted to the dual structure of variable cost functions in joint production. This allows identification of necessary and sufficient restrictions on technology and cost so that conditional factor demands can be written as...

Determining the impacts on consumers of governmental policies that affect the demand for food products requires a theoretically consistent micro-level demand model. We estimate a system of demands for weekly city-level dairy product purchases by nonlinear three-stage least squares to account for...

Farmland and capital are an important and rapidly expanding component of the agricultural economy, and empirical evidence suggests that these assets are quasi-fixed in that adjustment costs are incurred when holdings are altered. Increased interest in the rate of return for investing in farmland...

This paper proposes a straightforward, easy to implement approximate F-test which is useful for testing restrictions in multivariate regression models. We derive the asymptotics for our test statistic and investigate its finite sample properties through a series of Monte Carlo experiments. Both...

Do milk marketing orders affect various demographic groups differently? To answer this question, we use supermarket scanner data to estimate an incomplete demand system for dairy products. We use these estimates to simulate substitution among dairy products and the welfare impacts of price...