New technologies must be developed in sub-Saharan Africa which are sustainable and economically viable. This paper discusses a methodology for measuring the agricultural sustainability and economic viability of tropical farming systems for new technology evaluation. The approach is based on the...

Accurate assessment of farmers' credit constraint condition is important in order to understand the circumstances under which credit would have its greatest impact. In this study a switching regression model was used to determine the impact of credit on smallholder dairy farms in the East...

This paper demonstrates that, in situations in which a cumulative externality exists, the basic nature and extent of resource misallocation may be substantially less than we imagine. This conclusion stems from deriving consistent conjectures in a unified framework in which congestion is present....

A production function highly concave in inputs will have a dual profit function less convex in prices. Even large variations in prices will cause little variation in input usage and output, resulting in poor profit function estimates. This is demonstrated using Monte Carlo simulation with...

Numerous models of price-demand-supply behavior in agricultural markets have been proposed and estimated. The literature contains valuable contributions, but the cumulative effect is somewhat disappointing. This paper appraises the status of the price analysis literature and makes suggestions...

Soil specific, chance constrained, dynamic models of agricultural production and nitrate leaching are developed to assess the impacts of nitrogen fertilizer taxes, quantity restrictions on fertilizer or leachate, and leachate permits. A programming model uses the solutions of these bioeconomic...

The skewness of the conditional return distribution plays a significant role in financial theory and practice. This paper examines whether conditional skewness of daily aggregate market returns is predictable and investigates the economic mechanisms underlying this predictability. In both...

Public referenda are frequently used to determine the provision of public goods. As public programs have distributional consequences, a compelling question is what role if any social preferences have on voting behavior. This paper explores this issue using laboratory experiments wherein voting...

Asymmetric volatility refers to the stylized fact that stock volatility is negatively correlated to stock returns. Traditionally, this phenomenon has been explained by the financial leverage effect. This explanation has recently been challenged in favor of a risk premium based explanation. We...