Anaerobic digestion technology addresses environmental issues of waste disposal and greenhouse gas emission reduction. This paper examines attitudes toward adoption of this conservation technology on dairy farms. To specify an appropriate dependent variable without a large number of adopters, an...

Excess returns to producers insured by the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation can arise due to asymmetric information or from the design of the insurance programs themselves. Using unique, unit-level crop insurance contract data for major crops such as corn, soybeans, and wheat in five growing...

We investigate the trade-off agricultural producers face between profits and stewardly activities when selecting farm practices. Instead of the profit-maximization framework, we model producer behavior in an expanded utility framework, built on production technology, and including two utility...

The contingent valuation method (CVM) was used to measure the value of a community service, rural transit, that has both user and nonuser values. Traditional focus groups and a CVM questionnaire provide estimates of willingness to pay and willingness to accept. Tobit analysis was used to test...

This paper places the modern spread of diet-related chronic disease in the United States within the context of more than a century of innovation in food processing technology, discovery in nutrition science, and corrective policy measures aimed at improving public health. We ask whether the...

Life expectancy, literacy rates, per capita income, mortality and morbidity statistics have been widely employed in empirical analyses to construct various indices of quality of life (QOL). The reason why so many indices of well-being exist in the literature is partly explained by the fact that...