This study examines the effects of a wife's participation in the labor force and other socioeconomic factors on family expenditures for prepared food, food prepared at home, and food away from home using the Bureau of Labor Statistics 1992 consumer expenditure survey. On the one hand, results indicate that the number of children, home ownership with mortgage, seasonality, region, wife's age, and income are important determinants of expenditures on food prepared at home. A wife's education and participation in the labor force, on the other hand, affect expenditures on prepared food and food away from home. The impact of both these factors is greater on food away from home than on prepared food expenditures.

Trade theorists have demonstrated that different trade policy instruments have different effects on the quality and source of imports. Countervailing duties (CVDs), like specific tariffs, should induce quality upgrading. However, the magnitude and timing of the quality adjustments are influenced by the credibility of the duties that can be legally contested and modified after annual administrative reviews. Index numbers are used to assess the timing and magnitude of the product mix and country mix substitution effects in U.S. pork imports in response to the U.S. CVDs on Canadian exports of live hogs and fresh, chilled, and frozen pork.

Multiple-objective decision making (MODEM) provides an effective framework for integrated resource assessment of agroecosystems. Two elements of integrated assessment are discussed and illustrated: (1) adding noneconomic objectives as constraints in an optimization problem; and (2) evaluating tradeoffs among competing objectives using the efficiency frontier for objectives. These elements are illustrated for a crop farm and watershed in northern Missouri. An interactive, spatial decision support system (ISDSS) makes the MODEM framework accessible to unsophisticated users. A conceptual ISDSS is presented that assesses the socioeconomic, environmental, and ecological consequences of alternative management plans for reducing soil erosion and nonpoint source pollution in agroecosystems. A watershed decision support system based on the ISDSS is discussed.

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.

The United States and the European Union both employ export subsidies to stimulate wheat trade and to increase their competitiveness in world markets. The environmental consequences of these policies are being questioned. We stimulate reducing or removing export subsidies for wheat from the United States and the EU using a multicountry partial equilibrium model, and we analyze the impact of export subsidy policy reform on nitrogen fertilizer and other chemical use. Our findings indicate that the U.S. EEP program cannot be blamed for environmental degradation in terms of nitrate leaching, while EU wheat subsidies make only a small contribution to nitrate pollution.