Subsidized development of an in-state biofuels industry has received some political support in the state of Washington, USA. Utilizing in-state feedstock supplies could be an efficient way to stimulate biofuel industries and the local economy. In this paper we estimate supply under output price...

Dynamic effects of health and inter-state and inter-industry knowledge spillovers, Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth and convergence in US agriculture are examined using recently developed procedures for panel data and a growth accounting model. Strong evidence is found to support the...

Curvature properties of the indirect utility function are shown to be necessary and sufficient for refutable behavioural postulates in the form of comparative static results, reciprocity relations, and restrictions on output and input responses for firm models under risk. These postulates are...

Nonparametric support for two important hypotheses relevant to econometric model specification is examined. Results of various nonparametric tests for behavioural objective and aggregation level of Mexican agricultural production data are reported. The evidence does not refute the hypothesis...

We examine the impact of marketing contracts on farm cost structure and implied scale and scope economies for large samples of dairy, corn and wheat farms. We consider a multi-product, multi-market technology to examine returns from diversifying marketing schemes. Allowing for risk preferences...

Measurement of economies of scale and scope is particularly important for predicting growth and product diversification. However, estimates are useful only to the extent the underlying production technology is modelled accurately. This study measures economies of scale and scope in the rapidly...

The effects of alternative functional forms on parametric estimation of a multi-product cost function are examined using a sample of rural US banks. Functional forms considered for possible choice are three versions of second-order Taylor-series expansions (or locally-flexible functional...

Enterprise diversification has recently become a prominent feature of US dairy farms. Scope economies and risk aversion are two forces that simultaneously determine diversification. We jointly estimate scope economies and determine risk preferences under price uncertainty. We reject risk...