Land-use conflicts highlight several myths about property rights. The central myth is that property rights are linked to natural rights, that property rights are durable and unchanging, and that any interference with these property rights requires public compensation. However, particular settings and circumstances lead to conflicting rights claims which the courts must sort through to determine where the more compelling rights claim resides. Situations are not protected because they have property rights. Rather, those situations found worthy of protection by the courts acquire the status of a property right. Property rights are not discovered, but are created by the courts. Applied economists must build models of property rights conflicts predicated upon an epistemology of volitional pragmatism.

An interregional competition model of the U.S. apple industry is constructed. This model includes the consumer products of fresh apples, applesauce and apple juice. The validation of the model showed that it did a good job of estimating consumer's quantity demanded and prices and a reasonable job of estimating utilization. This model was used to study the effects of transportation cost changes on the industry in the short- and intermediate run. The total production and consumption levels changed by moderate amounts with changing transport costs while the utilization of a region's crop was quite sensitive to such changes.

Sensitivity of the general public to pollution of air, water and land has been rapidly increasing as urban development spreads into rural areas of Maryland, the Northeast and the nation. Among the rural groups who have become vitally concerned with this situation are dairy farmers. They are especially concerned over impending regulations for handling animal wastes and the possible effect on the economics of dairy operations.

Social critics have taken aim at modern production agriculture using a common theme: many food, health, and environmental problems are explained by corporate farms, agribusinesses, and fast-food restaurants failing to account for the full costs of their actions. How accurate is this diagnosis? How feasible is the assumption that these externalities are most effectively mitigated via Pigovian taxes and subsidies? Drawing on my experiences at a National Institute of Medicine meeting on the subject, I seek to clarify the definition and nature of externalities and discuss situations in which public policy is most and least effective in efficiently making “hidden” costs of food visible.

This paper estimates single-index model (SIM) beta coefficients for the major cash crops of Ontario's agricultural-producing counties. Beta coefficients are estimated using per acre gross revenues weighted by (1) the proportion of each crop planted in each county and (2) equal weights. The results show that sometimes substantial differences arise from these procedures. Implications for government policy and farm-level risk-management strategies are discussed. A practical approach for using SIM for farm management purposes is presented and the effects of systematic and nonsystematic risk are discussed.

Major changes in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food packages that were implemented in 2009 included reductions in the amount of milk and 100% juices, as well as the removal of whole milk from food packages. In analyzing the effect of these changes on the beverage consumption of Texas WIC children ages two to four, we found a significant decrease in the amount of whole milk consumed, and this decrease was partially offset by the increase in the amount of lower-fat milks consumed. Intakes of both desirable and undesirable nutrients from milk were decreased.

Animal disease events can lead to international trade restrictions which can vary in duration, products included, and geographical extent. Accounting for multilateral resistance between trading partners, a general gravity model of trade is estimated with a Hausman-Taylor and a Hausman-Taylor seemingly unrelated estimator to evaluate the trade quantity impact by commodity resulting from highly pathogenic poultry disease events in 24 exporting markets. Commodity specific results show that quantity traded and products demanded during a disease event differ by commodities. Understanding these impacts can better prepare exporters for potential changes in trade quantity given a disease event.

Crop insurance has been linked to changes in farm production decisions. In this study, we examine the effects of crop insurance participation and coverage on farm input use. Using a 1993–2016 panel of Kansas farms, evidence exists that insured farms apply more farm chemicals and seed per acre than uninsured farms. We use a fixed effects instrumental variable estimator to obtain the effects of change in crop insurance coverage on farm input use accounting farm-level heterogeneity. Empirical evidence suggests that changes in the levels of crop insurance coverage do not significantly affect farm chemical use. Thus, moral hazard effects from purchasing crop insurance are not large on a per acre basis but can lead to expenditures of $6,100 per farm.

An issue for generic advertising in agricultural markets with unregulated supplies is that the promotion-induced demand shift could lead to a supply response that substantially attenuates the price effects of the promotion. For the generic promotion of fish exports, however, the concern is generally just the opposite—the possibility that extensive government supply controls could render promotion efforts to expand export sales ineffectual due to little or no supply response. This study considers the effects of government whitefish (cod, haddock, and others) supply controls on the effectiveness of the Norwegian Seafood Council (NSC) whitefish export promotion program. We use an econometric simulation model to measure the effectiveness and returns to NSC whitefish export promotion under a range of possible export supply control conditions. Results indicate that effective supply control maximizes the return to promotion and that ineffectual supply control imposes a potentially large opportunity cost on the promoting industry.

An Exact Affine Stone Index demand model is estimated to analyze the household-level demand for nine nut products (peanuts, pecans, almonds, cashews, walnuts, pistachios, mixed nuts, macadamia nuts, and other nuts) in the United States using Nielsen Homescan panel data from 2009 through 2015. The demands for all nuts are elastic. All nut products are necessities and substitutes for each other. Household sociodemographic characteristics are statistically significant drivers of the demand for nut products. Finally, the effects of changes in the magnitude of selected promotion expenditure elasticities for nuts are simulated to determine their impacts on prices and quantities demanded.

Price expectations play a critical role in commodity markets where producers must make input decisions well before output is realized. This paper brings together alternative expectations regimes, their estimation, and hypothesis tests for use in structural commodity models to determine their use by commodity producers. Extrapolative mechanisms and rational expectations are considered under risk neutrality and risk aversion. The assumptions implicit in the use of aggregate data in these models are made explicit. Structural models using individual survey data are discussed. While Muth's rational expectations hypothesis has found widespread acceptance in the macroeconomic literature, empirical results from industry studies indicate that commodity producers may have heterogeneous price expectations, with no single expectations hypothesis dominating. This is not surprising given that different producers possess different information and have different costs associated with information collection and processing.

A highly disaggregated emissions factor model is presented. The model generates changes in emissions and resource use by state and 6-digit NAICS sector. Removal of all U.S. import restrictions is examined. Results for agriculture show that composition effects explain highly varied regional patterns of emission changes. Scale effects are also important for expanding sectors. Quantitative assessments such as this may prove useful in conducting full environmental reviews of U.S. trade agreements consistent with Executive Order 13141 and the Free Trade Act of 2002.

The benefits to Florida orange growers of generic orange juice advertising are assessed using additive, nonlinear, regional econometric models, measuring the impact of category and brand marketing efforts on category demand while controlling for pricing and various other factors. The study shows that generic marketing efforts increased orange juice category demand by 8.3 percent, resulting in increased orange prices and a benefit-to-cost ratio to Florida growers of 3.5 to 1. Branded promotional activity was found to primarily fuel brand switching and pantry-loading, with only modest impacts on overall category demand.

A characteristic of our rural policies is that we seem to treat farm policy and other rural policy as if agriculture and the rest of the rural economy and society are separate. Literature from each perspective tends to ignore the existence and context of the other. There has been enough change in the rural context, however, to require a different approach to rural policy analysis and formulation. We must start from a comprehensive view of the rural economy, including both the agricultural and nonagricultural rural economies. The paper discusses issues that have changed the rural policy context: the changed rural economic structure, macro forces, farm-nonfarm interdependence, and the political arena. These changing contexts create new opportunities for rural policy formulation. The paper concludes by suggesting that agricultural economists will contribute more to systematic knowledge and policy formulation if they base analysis on the changed objective conditions in rural areas, and utilize more theoretically-based analysis.

Stochastic simulation and generalized stochastic dominance are used to compare the risk-return properties of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange feeder cattle futures contract with those of the feeder cattle put option contract. Cash marketing, futures, and option strategies are analyzed for four backgrounding systems common to the mid-south region of the United States. The results show that at-the-money put option strategies dominate corresponding futures contract strategies according to generalized stochastic dominance. This implies that at-the-money put option contracts are superior to feeder cattle futures contracts for risk-averse backgrounders in the mid-south region of the United States.

Food waste has been recognized as an economic issue for at least a century and is gaining tremendous traction in academia as well as in discourse about public policy. The goal of our study is to examine the evolution of food waste over the last several decades at the United States and global levels. We first review the methodologies that have been used to estimate the magnitude of food waste so that the quality of the data can be evaluated. Though with limitations, existing data generally show that for many regions of the world, including the United States, pre-consumer food loss and waste as a share of total supply has been stable in recent decades. However, the aggregate share wasted masks important changes over time. We provide some evidence that food waste has shifted downstream in recent decades, i.e., from producers and processors to retailers and consumers. Through a reflection on the trends in major socioeconomic factors, we hypothesize that this downstream shift has been driven by increases in household incomes, improvements in technology, and changes in culture and institutions.

We use household scanner data, paired with rich demographics and merged with self-reported measures of obesity and body mass index (BMI), to investigate the potential effects of fruit and vegetable purchasing behavior on adult obesity and body weight. We find that increasing household fruit and vegetable expenditure shares by one percentage point decreases the multiyear incidence of adult obesity by approximately 9 percent and average adult BMI by 1.4 percent, controlling for a host of potential confounding factors and measures of lifestyle choices. The results are robust to specification choice, although estimated impacts differ by gender. Our findings help quantify the potential impacts of government efforts aimed at increasing fruit and vegetable intake.

Wind-borne diseases can spread rapidly and cause large losses. Producers may have little incentive to prevent disease spread because prevention may not be welfare-maximizing. This study proposes a market-based mitigation program that indemnifies producers against disease-related losses and provides an incentive to neighboring producers to take preventive action, which can substantially mitigate infestations, reduce the likelihood of catastrophic losses, and increase social welfare. An equilibrium displacement model simulates introduction of the program for U.S. soybeans. Simulations reveal that the market-based solution contributes to minor market distortions but also reduces social welfare losses and could succeed for other at-risk commodities.

This paper presents estimates of technical efficiency in milk production based on Farrell's non-parametric frontier production function methodology. Data from a sample of Maine and Vermont dairy farms, included in the ELFAC business analysis for 1979, were used to derive Efficient Unit Isoquants for capital-labor and concentrate feed-roughage combinations. The analysis indicates that milk production in Maine and Vermont farms was characterized by significant technical inefficiencies during 1979.

Survey data from Southeastern Pennsylvania is used to estimate the costs of current mushroom pest management practices. Pest management costs represent a sizeable proportion of the variable costs of producing mushrooms. The practices found are highly variable with costs ranging from $.04 to $.58 per square foot. The frequency of outside applications and steam use before and after the crop are the most significant practices influencing production costs.