The effective design and implementation of interventions that reduce vulnerability and poverty require a solid understanding of underlying poverty dynamics and associated behavioral responses. Stochastic and dynamic benefit streams can make it difficult for the poor to learn the value of such...

Rational choice theory commonly assumes that the presence of unselected choices cannot impact which among the remaining choices is selected–-often referred to as “independence of irrelevant alternatives.†We show that such seemingly irrelevant alternatives influence choice in a...

While there is mixed evidence of the impact of food assistance programs on obesity, there is general agreement that the food-insecure are at higher risk of obesity and obesity-related diseases. Food assistance programs, originally designed to overcome a lack of available food, now need to...

Consumers’ willingness to pay for postharvest-processed (PHP) raw oysters—oysters without health risks—is studied in experimental auction markets. The experimental design decomposes the effects of taste, objective risk information, and information on four PHP technologies on...

Competition from new store formats including supercenters, warehouse clubs, and mass merchandisers has emerged as a major threat to traditional grocery chains. A primary objective of this paper is to understand how the store-level performance is related to the workforce composition of full-time...

We estimate an error correction model representing demand for leafy green vegetables but generalize the structure to allow for adjustment to one conspicuous shock. We investigate whether the adjustment rate to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) 2006 warning that fresh spinach...

In Finland, expanding dairy farms often face the problem of additional fields being geographically distant and only available as small parcels. We develop a stochastic production frontier model to estimate the technical efficiency of Finnish dairy farms and simulate the effect of parcel distance...

When the modern era of environmental policy began with creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, economists and economics were little used. Over time, economics became a major contributor to formation of environmental policy. Executive...

A regression discontinuity approach is used to measure the impact of public-goods creating programs in a declining inner city neighborhood of Worcester Massachusetts. Using GIS data, we develop a hedonic model of residential sales, using a parcel-level GIS tax assessment and land use database...

This paper examines the adaptation of dasymetric mapping methodologies to agricultural data, including their testing and transposition, in order to recover the underlying statistical surface (i.e., an approximation of the real distribution of data). A methodology based on the ideas of Gallego...