With the 1996 Farm Act, the United States introduced payments that were designed to be "decoupled". Labor allocation choices are likely to be affected by receipt of payments, and income from off-farm jobs has been the major source of income for most farm households for sometime. This article...

The Census Bureau has recently begun releasing official statistics that measure the movements of firms in and out of business and workers in and out of jobs. The economic analyses in Producer Dynamics exploit this newly available data on establishments, firms, and workers, to address issues in...

Our paper begins with a consideration of the causal relationships among productivity, farm structure, government farm payments and public investments in research and extension. We then empirically test key relationships for a relatively recent period (1960-96) in the history of agricultural...

This paper examines the industrialization process of U.S. agriculture by examining the trends in the number of farms, the concentration of production during the last decade, and the dynamics of farm survivability, entry, and exit underlying aggregate statistics. We next examine vertical...

Because of policy interest in the size distribution of farms, there is an interest in understanding the causes of changing farm sizes. This paper addresses an overlooked issue in the literature on the determinants of farm size, namely, the empirical specification of farm size. We examine 5...

The industrialization of the food system is proceeding at a rapid rate and contracting is a key element in that industrialization. The purposes of this paper are to summarize contract terms in agricultural contracts for major commodities and to assess the determinants of variations in contract...

In 1914, the Cooperative Extension Service was established to disseminate information about agriculture and home economics from land-grant universities to the U.S. public. At that time, about 30 percent of U.S. workers were in agriculture-related occupations; by the late 1990s, that share had...