Our paper begins with a consideration of the causal relationships among productivity, farm structure, government farm payments and public investments in research and extension. We then empirically test key relationships for a relatively recent period (1960-96) in the history of agricultural...

Various forms of farmer savings accounts have been proposed to help U.S. farmers manage their income variability. Financial incentives include tax-deferral and government matching deposits. This paper estimates farmer eligibility, program size, and benefit distributions for two congressional...

Agricultural nonpoint pollution is inherently stochastic (e.g., due to weather). In theory, this randomness has implications for the choice and design of policy instruments. However, very few empirical studies have modeled natural variability. This paper investigates the importance of stochastic...

Farm restructuring in post-communist transition countries has resulted in a broad range of farm types, such as cooperatives, companies, partnerships and sole proprietorships. This study examines which factors affect production organization choices of rural households with an emphasis on the role...

This paper formalizes the production and export consequences of direct farm payments. Taxpayer financed direct payments distort exit and production incentives, while consumer financed subsidies also imply that the risks of domestic and export production differ. Welfare decompostion and empirical...

The effectiveness of limits and reductions in both export volumes subsidized and value of export subsidies in agriculture is evaluated. A perspective on consumer versus producer financed export subsidies is given. We analyze factors affecting the effectiveness of volume versus value commitments....

Since cotton producers do not own legal rights to kill insect populations that are susceptible to insecticides, individual producers may have no incentive to account for future, insecticide-resistance productivity losses arising from their pest-management decisions. As a result, the collective...

After nearly fifty years of stability and stagnation of dairy market regulations in Israel, a dramatic policy reform has been enacted in 1999. The reform enabled farm households, for the first time, to trade production quotas. In addition, the reform signaled to farmers that milk prices will...

Abolishing a nearly 50-year-old policy for rice price support, Korea adopted a new direct payment program in 2005. Making the transition to decoupled income payments has been governed by the need for operative and effective income safety nets and the WTO disciplines on domestic support. The...