The Double Hurdle Model in the Presence of Fixed Costs

We present a model of market participation in which the presence of nonnegligible fixed costs leads to non-zero censoring of the traditional double-hurdle regression. Fixed costs arise when household resources must be devoted a priori to the decision to participate in the market. These costs - usually a cost of time - motivate two-step decision-making and focus attention on the minimum-efficient scale of operations (the minimum amount of milk sales) at which market entry becomes viable. This focus, in turn, motivates a non-zero-censored Tobit regression estimated through routine application of Markov chain Monte Carlo Methods