With the end of the Supermarket Revolution in the 1970s, new forms of horizontal, vertical, and geographic competition have appeared to challenge the supremacy of the supermarket format. New retail formats like warehouse stores, supercenters, and fast-food outlets appear to affect local retail supermarket prices. Slotting allowances, coupons, and electronic data gathering have intensified retailer-manufacturer rivalry. Foreign direct investment offers the promise of new European-style management styles in U.S. grocery retailing.

We examine the determinants of agricultural experiment station faculty salaries and find that productivity pays—as manifest by grantsmanship, publications, and the elicitation of competing offers—with no residual evidence of a negative seniority-salary relationship that could signal university monopsony power. This contrasts with findings in the previous literature on faculty salaries. Moreover, national market salary benchmarks, which may proxy for imperfectly observable productivity, correlate almost one-for-one with individual faculty salaries, with individual deviations from peers’ salaries proving essentially random. This evidence is much more consistent with the hypothesis that experiment station faculty salaries are determined in a competitive labor market than with the prevailing wisdom that they are set monopsonistically.

The signing of the Uruguay Round agreement on agriculture (URAA) in 1994 was a significant step towards the liberalization of world agricultural trade. A new round of negotiations on agriculture is scheduled to begin under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the end of 1999. This paper discusses the likely agenda of those negotiations and their implications for agriculture in the northeastern United States.

Using daily fed cattle purchase transaction records collected by the Packers and Stockyards Program over the period April 1992 to April 1993, we identify characteristics associated with the choices of fed cattle procurement and pricing methods. The methodology involves the use of a multinomial logit model.

Regional concentration; processing capacity; number of head per lot; average weight per head; cattle type; yield grade, quarterly grade, seasonality, and distance from packing plants play a significant role in determining the methods of procurement and pricing chosen by packers. The method chosen by packers to procure fed cattle also affects the choice of a given pricing method.

Future trade negotiations will incorporate environmental concerns. This study presents a framework to evaluate whether the United States would be willing to adopt a pesticide restriction in exchange for European Union liberalization of producer support. It outlines the conditions that must be met if a bargain is to occur. Partial equilibrium commodity models test whether the conditions for a bargaining solution are satisfied. The research results indicate that a potential bargain is possible for stricter U.S. environmental regulations in coarse grains if there is a sufficiently large positive EU externality. Conditions in the oilseed market preclude a bargain.

A discrete choice model and site-specific data are used to analyze land use choices between crop production and pasture in the Corn Belt. The results show that conversion probabilities depend on relative returns, land quality, and government policy. In general it is found that landowners are less inclined to remove land from crop production than to convert land to crop production.

The entrance of additional countries into a European customs union, in this case Turkey, and its impact on agriculture are examined. Results from a trade simulation model are used as components of a Political Preference Function and utilized within a game theoretic framework to identify the optimal strategies for Turkey, the EU, and the U.S. Turkey's best interest, from an agricultural perspective, involves adoption of agreements made in the Uruguay round of GATT as a developing country rather than applying EU protection. Although free trade is not the optimal solution, simulations indicate that the solution does involve the reduction of agricultural protection levels.

Assuming asymmetric information over farmer profits and zero transaction costs, prior literature has suggested that when regulating nonpoint source water pollution, a tax on management practices (inputs) can implement full-information allocations and is superior to a tax on estimated runoff. Using mechanism design theory under asymmetric information, this paper shows that under the same assumptions, management practice taxes and taxes on estimated runoff are equally efficient.

This study estimates demand for wheat differentiated by classes using a dynamic AIDS model for the United States and the European Union (EU). The results suggest that imported wheat is more price responsive than domestic wheat in the U.S. market but not in the EU market. This may suggest that the Canadian policy that reduces prices of Canadian wheat in the U.S. market or U.S. export subsidies that raise prices of U.S. wheat could be expected to give rise to substantial substitution of Canadian for U.S. wheat. It is also found that in the EU, complementary relationships exist between spring and other wheat groups. This complementary relationship between the lower and higher quality wheat in the EU is not surprising because EU millers blend cheaper wheat such as EU common wheat and U.S. other wheat with high protein (spring) to obtain the preferred characteristics.

Agricultural land is being converted into rural residences at an unprecedented rate in the Inter-mountain West. Survey data have been collected for Sublette County, Wyoming concerning preferences for private land use and land use controls. Selected land use controls include zoning, purchase of development rights and cluster development. Local in-migration appears to be driven by the pursuit of open space and environmental amenities. Logit models are estimated for public and private choice co-variates. Private concerns about land use are the chief determinants of land use control approval.

This paper attempts to ascertain the requirements (in terms of ownership of factors of production) for successful adaptation to the Green Revolution in Indian agriculture. We estimate stochastic production frontiers for wheat in two Indian states: Haryana (which has been significantly affected by the Green Revolution) and Madhya Pradesh (where the Green Revolution has had much less effect). In Haryana, but not in Madhya Pradesh, larger farm size and ownership of land and machines positively influence technical efficiency. Thus, with the Green Revolution advancing, land consolidation and vesting of clear ownership rights of land and capital with farmers becomes important.

Traditional measures of productivity growth may not fully account for all sources of growth during the transition from conventional to alternative cropping systems. This paper treats soil quality as part of the production process and incorporates it directly into rotational measures of productivity growth. An application to data from an experimental cropping system in Pennsylvania suggests that both experimental learning and soil-quality improvements were important sources of growth during the system's transition.

Conjoint analysis was used to evaluate the preferences of graphic designers toward kenaf paper. Results indicate that price is of overwhelming importance to designers in their purchasing decisions regarding paper stock. If priced competitively with existing wood and recycled papers, kenaf products should gain market share among designers.

Despite the generally recognized need for facilities such as power plants, landfills, prisons, and medical laboratories, finding host sites has become extremely difficult. This study uses the expected utility (EU) model to explain individuals’ preferences in the hypothetical case of siting a municipal solid waste composting facility. The three principal factors which EU theory prescribes would affect the decision process—benefits of the proposed facility, losses from the facility, and the (perceived) probability of various scenarios occurring—embodied by the variables in a multinomial logit model explain a substantial amount of the variation in siting decisions.

In view of continuing economic stagnation and consequent budgetary constraints facing the state, Hawaii public libraries have been concerned with their operational efficiency and library managers have been seeking better methods in allocating limited resources among the libraries. This paper employed data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique to assess the performance and resource utilization efficiency of 47 public libraries in Hawaii. Three output measures—circulation, reader visits, and reference transactions and four input categories—collection, library staff, days open, and nonpersonal expenditures were used in the analysis. For fiscal year 1996/97, the estimated technical efficiency scores for Hawaii State public library branches ranged from 0.45 to 1.00, with an average of 0.84. The results showed that 14 of the 47 libraries are technically efficient. The estimated efficiency scores were related to relevant library-specific factors and community characteristics, such as total floor space, size of collection, population density, and location to identify factors influencing library performance. Only floor space and volume of collection did show moderate positive effects on library performance. The resulting information can be mainly useful in improving the performance of inefficient libraries. With special consideration to factors uncontrollable by the libraries the results may also be useful in allocating limited resources among them.

Policy makers are looking for ways to preserve farmlands, especially near urban areas. Farmers are also trying to find ways to increase their farm income by incorporating non-traditional activities into their farm routine. This paper attempts to quantify the contributions of selected nontraditional activities towards farmers’ efforts to enhance their farm income. For farmers involved in direct marketing, a logit model is used to estimate the probability of attaining high income for each activity considered. The results indicate that activities such as agrotourism, direct retailing to consumers, selling of farm related value-added products, greenhouse operations and urban location of farm markets will increase the chance of attaining high income levels.

Pheasant hunting benefits of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) were approximately $80 million/year in 1991 in states where the CRP appears most critical to pheasant populations. To obtain this benefit measure, the demand for pheasant hunting was estimated using a recently developed multi-site demand model, a national survey on recreation, and environmental data processed through a geographic information system (GIS). Thus not only is the resulting evaluation of the CRP's environmental impacts more accurately assessed than through the use of the generalized, supply-demand equilibrium models of previous work, but, more importantly, the environmental benefits of program acreage can be compared across field locations allowing subtle changes in policy to be assessed and the design and operation of a program to be optimized.

Technology adoption in dairy production allows for higher milk yield and lower per-unit costs. The importance of herd expansion and other factors to adoption was examined using a multinomial logit model and data from the USDA's 1993 Farm Costs and Returns Survey. Predicted probabilities of adoption were used to simulate the effect of herd expansion on milk production. Results identified age, size, and specialization in dairy production as important in increasing the likelihood of adopting a capital-intense technology. Education and size of operation positively impacted the decision to adopt a management-intense technology. Age, education, credit reserves, size, and increased usage of hired labor positively influenced the decision to adopt a combined capital- and management-intense technology.

This study examined possible economic impacts on Northern Plains grain producers of policies that could be undertaken by the United States to comply with the Kyoto Protocol. The paper begins with a discussion of the potential effects of the Kyoto Protocol on prices of energy and inputs used in agricultural production. The next section describes the data and econometric models that were used to develop a field-scale, stochastic simulation model of the crop production system typical of the Northern Plains. This model is based on econometric production models estimated with a spatially referenced, statistically representative sample of farmers in Montana. The simulation analysis shows that the impacts of higher energy prices would tend to discourage the use of fallow, raise variable costs of production by 3 to 13%, and reduce net returns above variable cost by 6 to 18% in the case of spring wheat grown on fallow. Under the higher cost scenarios assumed in an analysis conducted by the Farm Bureau, production costs for spring wheat on fallow would increase by 15 to 27% and net returns would decline by 15 to 24%.

A hedonic pricing model is developed to estimate the effects of policies to control agricultural sedimentation on lakeside property values at 15 Ohio state park lakes. Using an LA/AIDS demand system, we estimate changes in social welfare that result from upstream soil conservation practices and/or lake dredging activity, while holding other property characteristics constant. Policy simulation results suggest that lakeside residents generally have a higher willingness to pay on an annualized basis for sediment reduction from upstream soil conservation than for lake dredging. This has important implications for soil conservation policy, particularly in targeting improvements in the economic efficiency of the Conservation Reserve Program.