Evidence suggests that economists and agricultural economists have an unusual ability to create anxiety for university administration. Interviewers with university provosts and deans revealed support for faculty conducting relevant policy analysis, and discomfort with economists' participation...

Over the past four decades almost 400 U.S. counties have persistently experienced poverty rates in excess of 20%. This raises the question of whether poverty-reducing policies should be directed more at helping people or helping the places where they reside. Using a variety of approaches,...

To reconcile the discrepancy between the efficient market hypothesis and grain marketing recommendations by advisory services and extension programs, simulated prices from an efficient market are used to compare performance of marketing practices over the long run and in individual 40-year...

This study incorporates reference point effects into a stated choice survey of consumer demand for food with credence attributes. Parametric tests can be applied to the utility function to examine the existence of reference price effects. Results are consistent with prospect theory in that...

This article introduces a discrete choice model which incorporates a nonlinear structural adjustment to the standard utility coefficients or decision weights. The proposed model is theoretically and empirically appealing when compared to several alternative approaches, and it can be estimated by...

This paper presents empirical evidence to show how socioeconomic factors affect the adoption of and investment in agrochemicals in the cocoa sector of Côte d’Ivoire. The analysis uses primary farm-level data collected in 2002 from a nationally representative sample of more than one thousand...

This study investigated the prevalence and determinants of free-riding in the Ezemvelo Farmers’ Organization (EFO), a group of certified organic crop growers in South Africa, using data gathered in a census survey of its 151 partially and fully certified members. The computed free-riding...

Better dairy production could reduce poverty and improve nutrition in western Kenya, but the requisite technologies have not been widely adopted. This study collected dairy cow attributes from 630 households to evaluate what factors influence smallholder farmers to adopt technologies. Conjoint...

Although social capital is a potentially important asset for poverty reduction in developing economies, there has been little analysis of factors affecting its formation in developing countries such as Uganda. This paper analyzes what influences households to join local organizations and the...

This paper proposes an alternative measure of irrigation water efficiency based on the concept of input-specific technical efficiency. It uses a stochastic production frontier approach, based on Battese and Coelli’s (1995) inefficiency effect model, to obtain farm-specific estimates of...