A driving factor behind pesticide regulation in Canada and the United States is the desire to protect consumers from harmful residues on food. The Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) was unanimously passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996 and hailed as a landmark piece of pesticide legislation. It...

The primary purpose of this paper is to provide updated estimates of domestic own-price, cross-price and income elasticities of demand and estimated price elasticities of supply for various California commodities. Flexible functional forms including the Box-Cox specification and the nonlinear...

Major externality cases are random accidents which are not adequately addressed by the deterministic environmental policy literature -­‐ that of Pigouvian taxes, abatement subsidies and cap-­‐and-­‐trade. We consider a risk-­‐neutral industry where firms control the probability and...

We focus on determining the impacts of government programs on farms’ technical inefficiency levels. We use Kumbhakar’s stochastic frontier model that accounts for both production risks and risk preferences. Our theoretical framework shows that decoupled government transfers are likely to...

This paper builds a model determining optimal capacities of diversion dams or water transfer projects. The model incorporates stochastic inflows to the dams and the role of the dam capacity in reducing overflows, and gives a closed-form expression of the marginal benefit of capacities....

This paper quantitatively analyses the cost-effectiveness of alternative green payment policies designed to achieve a targeted level of pollution control by heterogeneous micro units. These green payment policies include cost-share subsidies that share the fixed costs of adoption of a...

Over the last 150 years, agriculture has been subject to several waves of innovation which have significantly altered its institutional structures, its products and the way it is practised. Mechanical, biological and chemical innovations have, in turn, reduced labour requirements, increased...

The study examines the least-cost option of conserving landraces in-situ by the development of market friction instruments. The empirical examination is comprised of two closely-related studies on eggplant production and consumption sectors of India. An examination of the cost and return...