DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL AGRICULTURAL POLICY INTERFACES

Agricultural and Food Policy,

DISCUSSION: IMPACT OF FEDERAL FISCAL-MONETARY POLICY ON FARM STRUCTURE

Agricultural Finance,

A GENERAL, DYNAMIC, SUPPLY-RESPONSE MODEL

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

The state-contingent approach to production under uncertainty

The central claim of this paper is that the state-contingent approach provides the best way to think about all problems in the economics of uncertainty, including problems of consumer choice, the theory of the firm, and principal–agent relationships. This claim is illustrated by recent developments in, and applications of, the state-contingent approach.risk, state-contingent production, uncertainty, Risk and Uncertainty,

INCENTIVES AND STANDARDS IN AGENCY CONTRACTS

This paper studies the structure of state-contingent contracts in the presence of moral hazard and multi-tasking. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the presence of multi-tasking to lead to fixed payments instead of incentive schemes are identified. It is shown that the primary determinant of whether multi-tasking leads to higher or lower powered incentives is the role that noncontractible outputs play in helping the agent deal with the production risk associated with the observable and contractible outputs. When the noncontractible outputs are socially undesirable and risk substitutes, standards are never optimal. If the noncontractible outputs are socially desirable, standards are never optimal if the noncontractible outputs play a risk-complementary role.incentives, multi-tasking, agency, risk complementarity, risk substitutability, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Risk and Uncertainty, D82, L23, L50,

Estimating Parameters of a Renewable Resource Model Without Population Data

A general approach to determining parameters of a traditional bioeconomic model is offered for the situation in which knowledge of resource abundance is unknown. Production parameters (such as catchability coefficients) and biological factors (such as natural mortality and recruitment) are included in the model. The general model is articulated for a typical fishery and further specified to obtain estimates of parameters for the St. John's River shad fishery. The results, considering the illustrative nature of the analysis, are promising and suggest avenues of additional research.Environmental Economics and Policy, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Risk and Uncertainty,

Agri-environmental Regulation on the Back of a Data Envelopment Analysis

A land retirement policy whereby land is taken out of agriculture and converted to natural vegetation or forestry has the potential to reduce environmental damage related to dryland salinity in Western Australia. This paper uses some recent results in the theory of directional distance functions (Chambers and Fare, 2004) to analyse alternative policy designs for a land retirement scheme. The results indicate that a fixed price scheme is inefficient compared with a first-best solution, but performs adequately. A scheme requiring a fixed proportion of area retired by all producers is inefficient. A separating solution, based on mechanism design, gives a small but significant increase in welfare compared to a fixed price scheme.Agri-environmental policy, distance functions, efficiency, mechanism design, Environmental Economics and Policy, Q12,

Generalized Invariant Preferences: Two-parameter Representations of Preferences

In this paper, we generalize the model of Quiggin and Chambers (2004) to allow for ambiguity, and derive conditions, referred to as generalized invariance, under which a two argument representation of preferences may be obtained independent of the existence of a unique probability measure. The first of these two arguments inherits the properties of standard means, namely, that they are upper semi-continuous, translatable and positively linearly homogeneous. But instead of being additive, these generalized means are superadditive. Superadditivity allows for means that are computed (conservatively) with respect to a set of prior probability measures rather than a singleton probability measure. The second argument of the preference structure is a further generalization of the risk index derived in Quiggin and Chambers (2004). It is sublinear in deviations from the generalized mean discussed above.