Many decisions in agriculture are made over combinations of inputs and/or practices that may be complements. The presence of complementarity among producer decisions can have deep implications for market outcomes and for the effectiveness of policies intended to influence them. Identifying...

Rate setting procedures for United States crop yield and revenue insurance contracts employ methods that presume correlations to be state invariant. Whether this is true matters. If yield-yield correlations strengthen when crops are subject to widespread stress, then diversification...

In animal agriculture, biosecurity decisions are dispersed across many herd owners. Choices impacting disease spread will be determined by impacts on private economic values, and so are economic externalities. However, externalities are not all alike. By way of three very distinct examples, we...

We develop a real option model of the irreversible native grassland conversion decision. Upon plowing, native grassland can be followed by either a permanent cropping system or a system in which land is put under cropping (respectively, grazing) whenever crop prices are high (respectively, low)....

Upon outbreak of a contagious animal disease, a primary motive for restoring disease-free status is often to regain access to international product markets. Efforts applied toward continuing or regaining such access is a public good-all growers benefit regardless of extent of private efforts...

Strong demand for agricultural commodities, high crop prices and pressure to reduce government budget deficits heighten the need for land retirement programs to be designed to maximize environmental benefits for any given budget outlay. The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is the largest land...

This paper models producers' interdependent incentives to participate in a voluntary livestock disease control program. Under strategic complementarity among participation decisions, after a slow start momentum can build such that market premium for participation and participation rate increase...

China's livestock production sector is changing rapidly to meet a variety of challenges. At the same time, China's domestic consumers have begun to demand better quality and safer dietary protein sources; potential for international food market penetration has been compromised by food scandals;...

The U.S. crop insurance market has several features that set it apart from other insurance markets. These include:(a) explicit government subsidies with an average premium subsidy rate of about 60% in recent years; and (b) the legislative requirement that premium rates be set at actuarially fair...

Based on the Ricardian rent theory, this study employs the variable profit function to analyze the determinants of Iowa cropland cash rental rates using county-level panel data from 1987 to 2005. Accounting for spatial and temporal autocorrelations, responses of local cash rental rates to...