Why would anyone want lower quality drinking water? The Safe Drinking Water Act allows an "affordability, variance technology, small system variance exemption" to the drinking water standards based on a supply side argument. It assumes small drinking water systems have significant diseconomies...

This paper uses a principal-agent model to examine incentive compatibility in the presence of information asymmetry between the government and individual producers. Prior models of livestock disease have not incorporated information asymmetry between livestock managers and social planners. By...

Due to high losses of agricultural land in urbanizing areas over the past several years, state and local governments have adopted zoning regulations, right-to-farm ordinances, preferential property tax programs, and other means to protect agricultural land resources. Critics of the farmland...

This article explores the barriers that prevent the adoption of HACCP system by food processing firms in Ontario, Canada. The study identifies four key groups of barriers that prevent firms from adopting HACCP system in their food safety control programs, namely questionable appropriateness,...

This study follows the standard factor endowment approach to explain the effects of environmental regulations on net exports in different product-based industries. It constructs an econometric model which includes factor endowments and environmental regulations to examine how strict...

A tractable two-stage constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function is applied to disaggregated western Canadian wheat and canola data for 1926-2003 to investigate the induced innovation hypothesis. Time series properties of the data are analyzed using cointegration and error...

As part of a recent anti-corruption campaign, the Brazilian government began to audit the municipal expenditure of federally-transferred funds. Using these audit reports, we construct a unique data set of political corruption to test whether reelection incentives affect the level of corruption...

This paper describes an experiment that was carried out in order to examine the decision making process of farmers in the Alentejo dryland region of Portugal. Cumulative Prospect Theory allows modeling the Alentejo dryland farmers' decision process, because when they decide what crops and...

Replaced with revised version of paper 08/03/05.

The introduction of mandatory country of origin labeling in the agricultural sector promises to yield consumer benefits by providing additional information to consumers. However, these benefits will be partially offset by the cost of labeling paid by producers. This study derives the labeling...