Ethanol policies have contributed to changes in the levels and the volatilities of revenues and costs facing ethanol firms. The implications of these policies for optimal investment behavior are investigated through an extension of the real options framework that allows for the consideration of...

This paper starts from the premise that diversification of assets, activities, and incomes is important to African rural households, in that diversification into nonfarm income constitutes on average about 45 percent of incomes, and the push and pull factors driving that diversification are...

We model interhousehold transfers between nomadic livestock herders as the state-dependent consequence of individuals' strategic interdependence resulting from the existence of multiple, opposing externalities. A public good security externality among individuals sharing a social (e.g., ethnic)...

The effects of government policies are analyzed in a conjectural variations model of U.S. food manufacturing. The policy elasticities of the perfectly competitive model are valid predictors of policy effects irrespective of the type of oligopoly. Changes in the degree of competition may alter...

This report is a summary of 2008 farm business data collected from 25 fruit farm businesses located in western New York State. Apples are the predominant fruit crop. The data are presented as averages for all 25 farms. The business analysis includes a balance sheet, income statement, cash flow...

Agricultural studies have often differentiated and estimated different technologies within a sample of farms. The common approach is to use observable farm characteristics to split the sample into several groups and subsequently estimate different functions for each group. Alternatively, unique...

The spread of Asian Soybean Rust (ASR) represents a real threat to the U.S. soybean sector. We assess the potential impacts of ASR on domestic soybean production and commodity markets as well as the competitive position of the US in the soybean export market. We develop a mathematical stochastic...

Corn ethanol plants consume large amounts of corn and their location has the potential to alter local crop prices and surrounding agricultural land values. The relationship between ethanol plant location and agricultural land prices is examined using data obtained from the Agricultural Credit...