A long-term whole-farm analysis compared conventional and low-input farming systems. Data from a nine-year agronomic study at the Rodale Research Farm, Kutztown, Pennsylvania, were used to analyze profitability, liquidity, solvency, and risk on a representative commercial grain farm. Conventional and low-input farms participating in government programs are the most profitable scenarios, followed by conventional and low-input farms not participating in government programs. All farms increased their net worth. The low-input approach is advantageous for risk-averse farmers using a safety-first criterion.

Short-run and long-run technical and allocative efficiencies were computed for 395 New York dairy farms using data envelopment or nonparametric procedures on 1990 Dairy Farm Business Summary data. The farms were, on average, more allocatively efficient in the short run than in the long run, but were more technically efficient in the long run than in the short run. Stanchion barns were as efficient as milking parlors, and milking more than two times per day did not increase efficiency.

Many observers have suggested that tax policy can be used to change the relative prices of foods in ways that will produce desirable health outcomes. We briefly review the economic evidence regarding such claims, and discuss several conceptual and pragmatic issues surrounding the use of such interventions to achieve public health objectives.

Stated preference scenarios often provide information on intermediate biophysical processes but omit information on the resulting final services that provide utility. This may cause respondents to speculate about the effects of intermediate outcomes on their welfare, leading to biased welfare estimates. This work clarifies distinctions between intermediate and final ecosystem services within stated preference valuation and develops a structural model by which to infer respondents’ speculations when a final ecosystem service is omitted. The model also derives implications for welfare estimates. Methods and results are illustrated using an application of choice experiments to fish restoration in Rhode Island's Pawtuxet watershed.

We use observational data from 22 elementary schools and over 48,000 child-day observations to examine the relationship between the number of fruit and vegetable items and the consumption patterns of children during school lunch. We find that each additional fruit or vegetable item that is offered increases the fraction of children who eat at least one serving of fruits and vegetables by 12 percent. We also use our observational data to provide practical information about which items are most likely to be eaten by children during lunch and compare this to the cost and nutritional quality of these items.

In the United States’ Northeastern region, there is an increasing interest in the public benefits from agriculture. These benefits are frequently referred to as multifunctional attributes. The policy challenge is to find an effective way to reflect these public demands so that multifunctional agriculture can be profitable. There is a significant research agenda that accompanies this challenge. Research topics include assessing and understanding consumer demand for multifuntional attributes, estimating the long-run returns to those production systems which supply these attributes, and designing and evaluating institutional arrangements to supply them.

The laboratory provides a test bed to inform many design choices for emissions permit markets. Experiments are sometimes strongly motivated and structured by specific theoretical models and predictions, but in other cases the experiment itself can be the model of the market and regulatory environment. We review specific experimental applications that address design issues for permit auction rules, permit expiration dates and banking, liability rules, and regulatory enforcement.

The agricultural policy agenda in the United States, Canada, and in Western Europe has been increasingly influenced by concerns for the sustainability of agricultural production systems. National, state, and provincial governments in North America are becoming increasingly sensitive to the environmental and human-health risks associated with current modes of agricultural production and policy actions, including restrictions on the use of certain agricultural chemicals and inducements to encourage the use of alternative production practices. Many restrictions and inducements have been undertaken or are currently under consideration in many jurisdictions.

Factors affecting the frequency of purchase of fish and other seafood for at-home and restaurant consumption by Northeastern consumers were investigated. Cluster analysis identified six groups of consumers with similar perceptions of the attributes of fish. Demographic and cluster membership variables were employed in logistic regressions to identify the characteristics of frequent at-home use and restaurant purchasers. At-home purchase was more likely to be frequent among respondents with white collar occupations, older ages, urban/suburban and New England residence, recreational fishing participation, and membership in one of five attitudinal clusters. Restaurant purchase was more likely to be frequent among whites and among those with higher incomes, white collar occupations, recreational fishing involvement and among members of two clusters with favorable attitudes toward fish; it was less likely to be frequent in households with children age 10 and under present.

Hedonic prices are estimated for summer and winter rentals for vacation houses located near a lake and ski-golf resort in rural western Maryland. Regressions for weekly rents are conditioned on house size, quality, and recreation features including lakefront proximity and ski-slope access. Percentage effects and marginal implicit prices indicate that access to recreation is reflected importantly in rental offers. Evaluated at the means, lakefront locations command a premium of $1,100–1,200 per week, and the premium for ski-slope access is $500–600 per week. Unit recreation values are about $18 per person per day for a lakefront location with a private dock and $7 per person per day for a ski-slope location. There are small differences in the unit values for three real estate management agencies. Although there is evidence of spatial correlation in ordinary least squares residuals, estimation of spatial-lag and spatial-error models does not yield substantial changes in the empirical results.

This paper identifies factors that influence consumers' seafood safety perceptions and examines how these perceptions affect consumers' anticipated consumption when consumers are provided with additional information relevant to seafood. A recursive system of equations is specified describing consumers' safety perceptions as a function of past experience with seafood, recreational harvest activities, and risk-taking behavior, and describing the influence of safety perceptions on consumers' anticipated demand response to hypothetical information concerning seafood. A telephone survey of randomly selected Rhode Island consumers provided data for the analysis.

Rational choice theory commonly assumes that the presence of unselected choices cannot impact which among the remaining choices is selected—often referred to as “independence of irrelevant alternatives.” We show that such seemingly irrelevant alternatives influence choice in a school lunch setting. In these lunchrooms, we provide evidence that the presence of specific side dishes—trigger foods—can strongly increase the sales of unhealthy à la carte options, even when the trigger foods are not selected. This behavioral anomaly can be exploited to lead children to healthier choices. We also offer a method that can be used to identify such foods.

Recent attempts to test the validity of the contingent valuation method have relied on laboratory-type experiments. In these experiments, willingness to pay responses in hypothetical choice experiments are compared with responses from choice experiments requiring actual payments. Often evidence of hypothetical bias is found. Critical for these experimental tests of hypothetical surveys is that the methodology used to elicit willingness to pay from subjects in the real-payment experiment be demand revealing. If it is not, then differences in responses to hypothetical and real valuation questions could be due to free-riding in the real-payment survey and not due to hypothetical bias in the hypothetical survey. This paper reports on experiments that implement a theoretically incentive-compatible revelation mechanism (a closed referendum) to elicit responses to valuation questions in both hypothetical and real experiments. As in earlier studies, evidence of an upward hypothetical bias is found.

Economic surveys of fisheries are undertaken in several countries as a means of assessing the economic performance of their fisheries. The level of economic profits accruing in the fishery can be estimated from the average economic profits of the boats surveyed. Economic profits consist of two components—resource rent and intra-marginal rent. From a fisheries management perspective, the key indicator of performance is the level of resource rent being generated in the fishery. Consequently, these different components need to be separated out. In this paper, a means of separating out the rent components is identified for a heterogeneous fishery. This is applied to the multi-purpose fleet operating in the English Channel. The paper demonstrates that failing to separate out these two components may result in a misrepresentation of the economic performance of the fishery.

Agritourism is a consumer-driven innovation that producers are exploring as a means to diversify and grow farm-based revenues. In order to help guide management and policy decisions, we conduct an exploratory spatial data analysis and find that travel infrastructure, region and rurality, characteristics of the local economy, and proximity to outdoor attractions are all significantly associated with the probability of a county being an agritourism hot spot. Mapping our primary spatial analysis’ residuals, we further identify counties with unique agritourism market conditions as a starting point to identify best practices that other regions interested in agritourism development might follow.

We examine challenges and opportunities involved in applying ecosystem services to public land management with an emphasis on national forests in the United States. We review historical forest management paradigms and related economic approaches, outline a conceptual framework defining the informational needs of forest managers, and consider the feasibility of its application given the types of ecological information typically available and the expanding set of services considered in management decisions. Economists can make their work more relevant to managers by broadening their focus to include qualitative approaches and more directly and effectively collaborating with managers and natural scientists.

Although attention has been given to how broadband access is related to economic development in rural areas, scant consideration has been given to how it may be associated with voluntary participation. This issue is important in that numerous studies have shown how much more vital community participation is in rural areas as compared to suburban and urban places. Drawing on three diverse data sets, we examine the influence of broadband access on community participation. In addition, we explore whether broadband access exerts its influence through, in conjunction with, or independent of social networks. The results suggest that broadband access and social network size have independent effects on volunteering in rural places.

The seafood market has changed substantially in recent decades, becoming increasingly globalized. This has led to introduction of new species and new sources of fish in most markets. We estimate a seafood demand system that, unlike models in previous studies, accounts for potential structural shifts caused by these market changes. We investigate the impact of tilapia as a new species and China as a new source on demand for imported whitefish in the United States. The results indicate that price flexibilities change substantially over time and that the structural shift takes place over a prolonged period.

This paper develops a logit-based conjoint analysis of willingness to pay for individual attributes of deer-hunting trips. Since deer-hunting success is uncertain, willingness to pay for enhanced likelihood of bagging a deer, rather than for certain success, is evaluated. Implicit costs of recreational travel time are also evaluated from hypothetical trade-offs between travel time and trip expenditures. The valuation of travel time derived here appears to reflect more the opportunity cost of foregone hunting than the opportunity cost of foregone work. This implies that travel-cost analyses of recreational demand, which impute costs of recreational travel solely from wage data, can yield biased valuations of recreational amenities.

A heteroscedastic double-hurdle model is used to investigate household butter consumption in the United States. Results suggest that failure to incorporate heteroscedastic errors may lead to unreliable elasticity estimates. Decomposition of the effects of variables leads to insightful information and makes the double-hurdle model a more useful tool in micro demand analysis. Larger and higher-income households are more likely to consume butter than others and also consume more, but income elasticity is very small. Age, region, and seasonality are among the other significant determinants of household butter consumption.