The study explores the implications of climate change for the economic costs of ecological conservation and restoration of submerged aquatic vegetation. It develops a methodological framework that addresses the key issues of uncertainty, irreversibility and space in climate change and...

Replaced with revised version of paper 08/05/04.

In this paper, we show formally that cooperatives can possess an informational - and hence cost - advantage compared to For Profit Firms. This advantage is directly linked to the goal alignment between the cooperative and its members, and is influenced by the extent of income redistribution...

Liberalization of the cocoa market in West Africa, due to structural adjustment reforms, has resulted in the elimination of para-statal marketing boards and initiated the creation of new institutions to replace the marketing services of those agencies. Concerns have been raised as to the effects...

Market efficiency and unbiasedness tests are performed for the first time for three forest commodity futures markets: softwood lumber, oriented strand board (OSB), and northern bleached softwood kraft pulp (NBSK). The Johansen cointegration procedure is applied to test long-term market...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/16/04.

Governments in developed countries aim to increase the market share of organic products as a possibility to improve the environment or animal welfare or as a reaction to food crises and changing consumer preferences. Assuming that organic farming creates a positive externality, we address the...

Users of agricultural markets frequently need to establish accurate representations of expected future volatility. The fact that range-based volatility estimators are highly efficient has been acknowledged in the literature. However, it is not clear whether using range-based data leads to better...

Over the last 20 years the cheese manufacturing sector has become the most important market for U.S. farm milk. Using a plant-level dataset encompassing the 1972-1997 period we examine the production characteristics of this industry. Using the results obtained from our cost function we estimate...

Estimates of direct and indirect material and energy usage for New York State are derived from existing input-output and natural resource and energy databases. The work provides both a generally applicable methodology and an empirical example for estimating energy and material flow impacts at...