The performance of the grain transportation industry, historically low real grain prices, and decreasing government support for grain prices have renewed interest in local grain prices and shipping costs. An understanding of the relationship between local cash prices and futures prices is an...

Substantial changes have taken place recently in the regulation of agricultural trade in North America. The effect of these changes on trade in agricultural commodities is of particular interest to producers and policymakers in the Northern Plains and Rockies region. In this paper, we discuss...

Consumers voluntarily pay significant price premiums to acquire unobservable environmental attributes in green markets. This paper considers the performance of eco-certification policy under circumstances where consumers cannot discern environmental attributes in goods, but are able to form...

Major externality cases are random accidents which are not adequately addressed by the deterministic environmental policy literature -­‐ that of Pigouvian taxes, abatement subsidies and cap-­‐and-­‐trade. We consider a risk-­‐neutral industry where firms control the probability...

We develop a model of regulation of environmental risks in a heterogeneousindustry when policy makers are sensitive to uncertainties about the processes generating the risks. Optimal source reduction capacity is shown to vary according to site suitability. Optimal source reduction capacity and...

A key argument in the societal debate against polices tosupport biofuels is that production of these alternative fuelsmay in fact consume more energy than they generate andemit more greenhouse gases than they sequester (Fargione etal., 2008; Searchinger et al., 2008; Rajagopal and Zilberman,2007; Farrell et...

It has been hypothesized that differentially applied environmental regulations create pollution havens, as firms will choose to invest in countries with lax environmental standards. Using a theoretical model of pest control adoption and an empirical spatial equilibrium model, we examine one such...

Traditionally, disaster assistance was available on an ad hoc basis, but the 2008 Farm Act provides a standing disaster assistance program known as Supplemental Revenue Assistance (SURE). This paper introduces a theory of nested insurance to evaluate the impact on of SURE on intensification,...

This paper derives a method to quantify the short- to medium-run impact of biofuel on fuelmarkets, assuming that these markets are dominated by cartel of oil-rich countries, and that pricesin these countries are set to maximize the sum of domestic consumer and producer surplus, leadingto a wedge...

The International Consortium on Agricultural Biotechnology Research held its 13th annual conference in Ravello, Italy in June 2009. The theme of the conference was the bioeconomy,and this topic was addressed through research presentations from academia, government, and industry. Numerous...