In many ways, the modern market for food exemplifies the economist’s conception of perfect competition, with many buyers, many sellers, and a robust and dynamic marketplace. But over the course of the last century, the U.S. has witnessed a dramatic shift away from traditional diets and toward...

We show in this paper that instability is an intrinsic cause of production variability in a dynamic inventory system. We first show that a unique stationary optimal policy exists for both full-backlog and lost-sales case and under the policy a firm replenishes its inventory to a constant target...

Opportunistic behavior in crop insurance can arise due to asymmetric information between producers and the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation. Producers who insure fields using transitional yields based on county average yields or who select options such as buy-up coverage or revenue insurance...

A structural inter-temporal model of agricultural asset arbitrage equilibrium is developed and applied to agriculture in the North-Central region of the U.S. The data is consistent with a unifying level of risk aversion. The levels of risk aversion are more plausible than previous estimates for...

Washington voters passed Initiative Measure No. 688 on November 3, 1998. This bill increased Washington’s minimum wage to $5.70 on January 1, 1999.and to $6.50 on January 1, 2000. The Initiative required that future annual changes in Washington’s minimum wage be indexed to inflation in the...

Determining the impacts on consumers of government policies affecting 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...

We analyze growth and diversification of U.S. dairy farms by examining changes in ten size cohorts and new entrants through three successive censuses. We reject Gibrat’s law and the mean reversion hypothesis of growth. Growth rates appear bimodal where the smallest and largest farm cohorts...

We estimate a model of suppression productivity for individual fires, where suppression productivity is measured in terms of the reduction in the estimated market value of wildfire losses. Estimation results show that at the margin, every dollar increase in suppression costs reduces resource...

Wind erosion and blowing dust are major problems for traditional tillage winter wheat-summer fallow in eastern Washington. Wind erosion reduces soil productivity and dust particulates are a major air quality concern. Conservation tillage summer fallow can reduce wind erosion markedly, but is...

An Operational Approach for Evaluating Investment Risk: An Application to the No-Till Transition Abstract: Roy’s safety-first rule is used to provide measures popular with farmers of short and long term business risk associated with various no-till transition strategies over an investment...