Despite the constant and frequent merger activity across various industries in the U.S. and throughout the world, limited evidence of the success of corporate mergers has been documented. The vast body of academic research demonstrates that most mergers add no value or reduce shareholder value...

Loss aversion has become the dominant alternative to expected utility theory for modeling choice under uncertainty. The setting of the base payment in contracts provides an interesting application of referenced based decision theory. The impact of loss aversion on contract structure depends...

We develop a model of decision makers' demand for agricultural economic information services. This modeltreats choice of externaldecision-support services as a function of actors' assessment of how alternative investments in information complement their internal competencies. Data from a survey...

With growing interest in cellulosic biofuels production, U.S. farmers may soon be called upon to produce new commercial dedicated energy crops such as miscanthus. Producing miscanthus however poses new risks to farmers. In particular, the ambiguity of commercial miscanthus yield risk to date and...

In economic models of behavior consumers are assumed to value the goods and services they purchase based on stable preferences over externally identifiable attributes such as quality. These models predict that consumers will respond to changes in price in a way that is independent of the source...

Food commodity prices have recently increased sharply and become more volatile, highlighting greater uncertainty in markets and serious implications for food security among the poor globally. High fuel prices combined with legislative policies have increased biofuel production causing high food...

The Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program for farmers was established in 2002 to assist farmers adversely affected by import surges. Since its introduction, the program has been mostly underused by farmers, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009 eased the program rules...

The Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program for farmers was established in 2002 to assist farmers adversely affected by import surges. Since its introduction, the program has been mostly underused by farmers, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009 eased the program rules...

U.S. import tariffs on ethanol are designed to offset a tax credit that benefits U.S. and foreign producers alike. The tax credit is an ethanol consumption subsidy but ethanol market prices increase by almost the full amount of the credit as the impact on world oil prices is small. Therefore,...

The US Congress has become concerned with the possibility that much of the recent rise in oil prices is due to speculation or market manipulation. We propose a theory of futures market manipulation that can potentially explain such manipulation and an associated price bubble. Our model involves...