This study examines the market structure-conduct-performance relationship for 48 four-digit SIC Food and Tobacco Processing Industries during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The simultaneous-equation analyses are used to explore the relationship among price-cost margin (PCM), market concentration,...

We propose an information-theoretic approach to assess the performance of a discrete choice model used to analyze land use and land use change. We show that our disaggregated measure can be used to compare robustness of predictions across land use categories and across models. Furthermore, a...

A great deal of research has been done regarding economic and consumer aspects of organic agriculture. A different form of agriculture, called biodynamic agriculture, is emerging, with acreage located across the globe. Like organic agriculture, biodynamic agriculture has a certification process,...

Econometric models of commodity prices have been estimated for more than 80 years, but both structural and time series models require ad hoc assumptions to capture all the features of commodity price series. Commodities can be broadly divided into two categories: storable and non-storable. The...

Zeroes expenditure represent a difficulty in the analysis of household survey data. Zero expenditures are the result of two phenomena: nonconsumption and infrequency of purchase. Distinguishing between these types of zeroes is difficult in the kinds of data of interest to agricultural...

Knowledge of low-income issues in floodplain management is spotty. Repeated flooding resulting from hurricanes striking North Carolina, and most recently Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, has raised concerns that vulnerable low-income communities may be more exposed to the devastating costs of...

The study evaluates the gains of avoiding data-dependent specification search on an estimation sample in an application to discrete choice models. We incorporate data splitting, the process by which the total available sample is randomly split in two or more sub-samples with the first...

Increasingly, grocery stores are marketing foods differentiated as locally produced. Freshness and taste are obvious reasons for consumer preference for these goods, but also important may be home-bias. Whatever the motive, there is substantial evidence that some consumers are willing to pay...

Economic theory is replete with causal hypotheses that are scarcely tested because economists are generally constrained to work with observational data. This article describes the use of causal inference methods for testing a hypothesis that one random variable causes another. Contingent on a...