Soil is a capital asset and a renewable resource that requires continued maintenance to ensure the sustainability of agricultural output in the long-run. Growers are continually adjusting the soil's productivity by adding and extracting soil nutrients, and modifying the soil structure through...

Economic theory is replete with causal hypotheses that are scarcely tested because economists are generally constrained to work with observational data. This article describes the use of causal inference methods for testing a hypothesis that one random variable causes another. Contingent on a...

This paper demonstrates a robust method for achieving disaggregation in the estimation of flexible-form farm-level multi-input production functions using minimally-specified data sets. Since our ultimate goal is to address important questions related to the distributional effects of policy...

The model specification problem is perhaps the Achilles heel of applied econometrics. Rather than test down to a single model as is usually done, we estimate 72 different demand systems and use Bayesian averaging procedures over all 72 systems to generate meta estimates of the parameters (e.g.,...

We describe a means of rejecting a null hypothesis concerning observed, but not deliberately manipulated, variables of the form H0: A -/- B in favor of an alternative hypothesis HA: A -- B, even given the possibility of causally related unobserved variables. Rejection of such an H0 relies on the...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/24/11.