When free trade merges formally distinct non-competitive industries, welfare should increase. Additional incentives for mergers may reduce these gains from free trade. We show the importance of such arguments in an analysis of the malting barley industry in North America before and after the...

Substantial changes have taken place recently in the regulation of agricultural trade in North America. The effect of these changes on trade in agricultural commodities is of particular interest to producers and policymakers in the Northern Plains and Rockies region. In this paper, we discuss...

Market-oriented policy reforms have potentially important effects on farm-level grain production and utilization decisions in developing countries. This paper provides an empirical evaluation of the potential effects of market liberalization in China on farm-level wheat consumption, market...

The reintroduction of the gray wolf to Montana and other western states has to date largely pitted ranchers against environmental groups, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) as the central agency for this reintroduction. There is also another group affected by wolves that to date...

Put options have been recommended as a substitute for price support programs (Gardner, 1977), and subsidized option purchases have received some support in lieu of subsidized insurance programs. Put options are an interesting alternative to price supports because their market-determined price...

This article reviews two major approached used in the past for risk analysis—the expected utility approach and the use of safety rules—and endeavors to reconcile their applicability and use in light of the recent nonexpected utility risk literature and working using the mean-Gini...

Revenue insurance, only recently introduced for major crops in the U.S., has captured a considerable share of the multiple-peril insurance market. This study evaluates the predictive reliability of using price distributions inferred from options markets to rate revenue insurance products. We...