Despite of the important role international migration fills in the United States’ labor-intensive agricultural sector, few studies have addressed the individual characteristics and circumstances surrounding entry and exit by farm laborers. With increasing public attention on international...

The increasing use of production contracts in the hog sector has reduced the number of spot market transactions, raised concerns about price manipulation and helped to spur legislation requiring price reporting by packers. Using data from the 2002 and 2007 Censuses of Agriculture, this study...

In recent decades there has been a substantial increase in the scale of production and the use of production contracts in the hog sector. This paper explores empirically whether these two phenomena are related by examining whether the use of production contracts has allowed finish hog operations...

This paper proposes and applies an innovative estimation approach for farm group programming models using Generalised Maximum Entropy. The proposed set-up simultaneously determines calibrating cost function parameters and input allocations to production activities. The methodology is applied to...

This research examines the effect of risk and time preferences on forest management responses to forest tenure land reforms in Fujian, China that began in 2002. The different extent of the reform and its different timing across regions provide a natural experiment to test how time and risk...

2010 AAEA Presidential Address; forthcoming in January 2011 AJAE in shortened version.

Generated crop insurance rates depend critically on the distributional assumptions of the underlying crop yield loss model. Using farm level corn yield data from 1972-2008, we revisit the problem of examining in-sample goodness-of-fit measures across a set of flexible parametric,...

The inclusion of cover crops in cropping systems brings both direct and indirect costs and benefits. The literature has shown that cover crops can improve soil conservation and productivity, potentially improving cash crop yields and decreasing cash crop production costs. Farmers will adopt...

Abstract Bromus Tectorum is an invasive plant species known to reduce abundance of native perennial grasses, increase fire frequency and intensity, decrease animal performance, and alter microbial communities and ecosystem processes. Specifically, in the Intermountain West, Bromus has been...