A discrete stochastic, programming model is formulated to study the gains from diversification when farming operations are augmented with off-farm financial assets that are not highly correlated with returns from farming. We extend past research by considering the dynamics of accumulating these...

A sample of Kansas farms was used to examine the impact of risk and specialization on mean financial performance. Mean financial performance was hypothesized to be influenced by risk, age of the operator, percentage of acres owned, financial efficiency, leverage, specialization, and farm size....

The paper discusses the linkages between the "globalization" of agricultural markets over recent decades and the decisions being made by individual farmers and ranchers in the United States. It is noted that technological advances lead to globalization of agricultural commodity markets and...

A dual cost function approach is developed as an alternative to time series and simplistic approaches for estimating farmers' expected operating rates of return on assets. A translog restricted cost function is estimated using data provided by 152 North Carolina dairy farmers over the period...

A model to value Federal Agricultural Mortgage Corporation (Farmer Mac) agricultural mortgage-backed securities (AMBS) is developed and numerically solved. The results suggest prepayment penalties currently being used by Farmer Mac reduce yields on AMBS considerably. Even with prepayment...

The sensitivity of farm inventory investment to movements in cash flow is tested. Inventories should be sensitive to shifts in cash flow because inventory investment is readily reversible and inventories are a significant portion of assets. Investment models estimated with Kansas farm panel data...

The paper analyzes the relationship between off-farm labor allocation and on-farm enterprise diversification as farm household income stabilization strategies with census data from the federal state of Upper Austria, Austria. The results suggest that both on-farm diversification and off-farm...

An analysis of the characteristics of farm businesses by size of FCS direct lending association suggests that further consolidation of FCS lending should have limited negative impacts on credit availability. Commercial-sized farm businesses with FCS real estate debt appeared similar to those who...

We evaluate agricultural bank management performance, focusing on the impacts of interstate banking laws on productivity change. The generalized Malmquist productivity index decomposes productivity change into technological change, technical efficiency change, and change in scale economies....

The objective of this study was to identify factors which contribute to the earnings' success of cash grain farms in the United States. The study analyzes three measures of success including net farm income per dollar of asset, operators' returns to labor and management, and operators'...