To investigate the poor participation rate of cranberry growers in the multiple-peril crop insurance program, a sample of 15 Massachusetts growers was interviewed. According to their risk preferences, a much greater proportion of growers should have insured, than actually did. A possible...

Use of the economic threshold to improve the efficiency of preemergent-herbicide treatment decisions is limited by a lack of weed information. An economic model for assessing the expected value of weed information needed to implement a threshold decision rule is developed. Empirical results...

The hedonic pricing technique was used to measure that component of house price attributable to proximity to a city park, using data on sale prices and characteristics of houses in Worcester, MA. Aggregation of these residual values over all houses in the neighborhood of a park provided an...

Bias in estimating recreational values may result if congestion is ignored in the demand model specification. Theoretical and empirical considerations pertaining to recreation congestion are summarized. Empirical results for camping in Western Massachusetts are presented which demonstrate the...

Insurance rates for crop yield protection programs have traditionally been calcu lated from county average yie lds. Where grower acreages and yields are not homogeneous, this approach leads to higher premiums and payouts and greater incidence of adverse selection . With individual grower data a...

Forecasts made by econometricians are typically conditioned on actual values of explanatory variables, even when at the time of the forecast, such variables might not be available. As a first step, one might test the adequacy of econometric specification by comparing conditional post sample...

Most econometric studies of the groundfish sector have suggested that either imports are not sensitive to U.S. prices, or that domestic prices are not much affected by imports, or both. Using a six equation model of the domestic fresh groundfish market we obtained contrasting results. For...