This article first constructs a theoretical model of land use by swidden cultivators when these cultivators can choose whether to grow a cash crop or a food/subsistence crop. Second, it studies the land quality accumulation decision faced by shifting cultivators and, in the process, it shows how...

Herding is an integral part of ranch operations in contemporary times. An aspect of herding that has received scant attention in the literature concerns the pros and cons of searching for livestock animals that have wandered away from a pasture and are hence missing from this pasture. Under what...

Recently, Batabyal proposed an unconventional population control policy that is sensitive to the cultural desire for male progeny in many Asian nations. Although the proposed policy is culturally sensitive, a potential problem with this policy is that the aggregate size of the national...

Recently, Batabyal and Yoo (2004) have used a queuing model with two types of citizens (high and low opportunity cost of time) to compute mean wait times in queue for the so called non-preemptive corruption regime. The purpose of this note is to extend the Batabyal and Yoo (2004) analysis....

The notion of a reservation quality or utility is a key feature of Batabyal's (2003a) recent analysis of decision making in arranged marriages. In this model, the magnitude of the reservation utility has a nontrivial impact on the decision to accept or decline a marriage proposal. Even so,...

It is now common for parents and relatives of an individual seeking to have an arranged marriage to set up one or more meetings between this individual and prospective spouses. As a result of these meetings, prospective spouses get exposed to this marrying individual. Even though this exposure...

Regulations specify the maximum amount of waste that can be stored on site by a waste generating firm. When this regulatory threshold is reached, a polluting firm must move its on site waste to an off site recipient. In this setting, we analyse two questions in a stochastic framework from the...

Although arranged and love marriages have been around for a long time there seems to be no comparative analyses in the economics literature of the relative merits of one or the other kind of marriage. As such, the purpose of this note is to conduct a theoretical inquiry into the desirability of...

This note addresses the following hitherto unstudied question in rangeland management: What is the steady state distribution of livestock animals for rangelands that are managed using short duration grazing? This paper uses the theory of alternating renewal processes to answer this question and...

A long-standing question in range management concerns the relative importance of the stocking rate versus the length of time during which animals graze a particular rangeland. Recently, Batabyal and co-workers provided a theoretical answer to this question. Given the importance of this question...