Burning bluegrass seed stubble is an important production practice that, among other benefits, increases production and stand life of this perennial crop. Despite economic forecasts that higher production costs from the 1996 state ban on seed stubble burning would reduce Washington production by...

We analyze growth and diversification of U.S. dairy farms by examining changes in ten size cohorts and new entrants through three successive censuses. We reject Gibrat's law and the mean reversion hypothesis of growth. Growth rates appear bimodal where the smallest and largest farm cohorts grow...

Increasing national focus on renewable energy has prompted a reappearance of anaerobic digestion technology installations on dairy farms. The focus of this study is on an operational digester in Washington State. Using the first two years of physical and financial data from the operational...

Structural models used to measure market power, though widely employed, continue to be criticized. We compare alternative market power tests, including nonparametric and Solow residual-based (SRB) tests. We develop SRB methods that permit nested testing for both monopolistic and monopsonistic...

Partial and total factor productivity (TFP) measures of Mexican agriculture are calculated for 1960–90. The long-run effects of research and international transfer of technology on TFP are examined over the 1940-90 period using cointegration procedures. TFP increased at an average annual rate...

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are used to estimate a seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) system of input demand functions for U.S. agriculture. Our demand functions have flexible forms and allow for nonrandom technical inefficiency. Concavity constraints are imposed at individual data...

The generalized composite commodity theorem (GCCT) and testing procedure is extended to test for consistent aggregation of the United States and Mexican agricultural production data in each category for which earlier tests rejected homothetic separability. Nonrejected GCCT and separability...

The hypothesis of induced innovation is tested for U.S. agriculture using a high-quality state-level panel data set and three disparate testing techniques—time series, direct econometric, and nonparametric. We find little support for the hypothesis. That conclusion is robust across testing...

Concern for the potentially harmful side effects of agricultural chemical inputs, especially pesticides, highlights the need to accurately determine the economic levels of their use. We consider three model specification issues: interaction of direct production inputs with damage control inputs...

U.S. agricultural crop and livestock relationships are examined in the context of both duality and time-series econometrics. Based on time-series test results, cointegrated models are estimated. Traditional models generally overestimated the precision of statistical relationships and gave a...