Varying degrees of criticism have been leveled at the U.S. higher education system. The increasing money costs to obtain the bachelor's degree, and degree recipients who are noncommunicative, non-decision makers, and not exposed to the liberal arts have been voiced as deficiencies of the system. The Carnegie Commission has recently recommended reevaluation of our universities’ curricula and philosophies and U.S. Secretary of Education, William Bennett, has crusaded for education overhaul.

Since I have no quarrels with Dr. Koch's excellent and vivid synoptic view, my comments will address the workshop that Bob and I attended at Colorado State University from my vantage point and I will attempt to show parallelisms to Glenn Johnson's views on research methodology as presented in his 1986 book on “Research Methodology for Economists.”

This study constructs a simulation model to evaluate the potential for conflict among residential and agricultural users of water in southern Rhode Island. The model estimates the profitability of irrigation of turf farms and projects the total use and the economic value of irrigation water. The results indicate that the economic value of irrigation water compares favorably with current residential water prices in the area. In addition, substantial demand for irrigation water is projected. Given current rates of growth in turf acreage and residential water use, there appears to be a significant potential for conflict, particularly given the absence of well developed institutions for allocating water among users.

A spatial equilibrium model is used to quantify the effects of a severance tax on the Pennsylvania coal market. Two regions are identified: the Pennsylvania Market Area and an import/export region. The impacts on prices and quantities of coal supplied and demanded are found to be small. Little of the tax is exported from Pennsylvania, with a high proportion of the tax being passed back to Pennsylvania coal producers. Although the tax revenue exceeds the welfare losses in Pennsylvania, this result is very sensitive to the magnitude of the Pennsylvania own-price demand elasticity.

Recent efforts to refine the concept of existence value and to empirically measure it has led to an unnecessary narrowing of the concept of existence value. This paper uses the literature on public goods to argue that existence value is a much broader concept than proposed by several authors. Two commonly used but different empirical approaches to measuring existence values are compared and shown to lead to statistically different decompositions of total value between use and existence categories.

Specification of the variance-covariance matrix holds continuing interest for agricultural economists considering risk programming applications. This research examines alternative expected value-variance (E-V) frontiers constructed using contemporaneous and non-contemporaneous data and two statistical assumptions concerning crop prices and yields. Empirical examples from two locations for different crops illustrate the various assumptions. Considerable differences in the E-V efficient frontiers occur in both empirical settings.

Gauging the impact of recent policy changes, this article analyzes production characteristics and the impact of the dairy assessment for northeastern dairy farmers as compared to other major production regions. Employing a restricted translog variable profit function, returns to size, shadow prices, supply elasticities for milk and livestock as well as demand elasticities for concentrate were estimated. Northeastern, just as midwestern farmers, were less responsive in milk supply and concentrate demand, more responsive in livestock production, and less efficient than their California and Texas counterparts. The dairy assessment affected profits of northeastern farmers later than those of other regions. Negative shadow prices indicated overinvestment into fixed factors.

Uneven monthly milk production (seasonality) is a major problem to the New York dairy industry. This article estimates expected monthly milk production response to a set of hypothetical seasonal price differentials designed to reduce the degree of seasonality. The analysis is based on a random mail survey and farm record data. The results indicate that a seasonal price differential of $1.12 per cwt. (over three times the current differential) would be necessary to completely balance spring and fall production in New York, based on the perceptions of farmers surveyed. Also, producers with better managerial skills are shown to be able to reduce their seasonality at a significantly lower price differential than less skilled farm managers.

The investment potential of warm-season grasses is compared with that of cool-season grasses, with special emphasis on hill-land beef production. In addition to evaluating relative costs and returns for various grazing systems, a sensitivity analysis is conducted. The results are then illustrated for a representative hill-land farm in West Virginia, and both an optimal and a set of quasi-optimal solutions are generated within the linear programming framework. In general, warm-season grasses are found to be a superior investment alternative for hill-land beef producers.

With the passage of the Dairy and Tobacco Adjustment Act of 1983, dairy fanner investment in product research, nutrition education, advertising, and promotion in the United States increased from $60 million to $200 million annually. A key decision faced by boards managing these funds is how best to allocate available advertising funds among the various dairy products. In this paper an economic model is developed that shows the allocation of funds among products that would maximize sales in a given market. The model is applied to the New York City market with results suggesting that over the study period diverting funds from fluid milk to cheese advertising would have enhanced milk-equivalent sales in the market by as much as 1.17% or 8.21 million gallons annually. Alternatively, the model suggests that the same sales level could have been achieved with a different allocation of funds resulting in an estimated 14.6% savings in the amount spent advertising the two products.