Agribusiness firms face substantial market risk associated with variations in farm production, output and input prices, exchange rates, and other factors. Some of the risk faced by agribusiness is passed through to the employees of the firm and to the communities where the firms are located, as employment levels are changed in response to these variations. An econometric analysis of the transmission of sales changes into payroll changes was performed for a sample of Georgia agribusiness firms. Transmission elasticities were found to be affected by firm type, size, age, and by the degree of use of part-time employees.

A two-stage approach is used to estimate sensitivity of corn, wheat, and soybean yields to changes in prices and land idled. Estimated elasticity of demand for fertilizer per acre with respect to expected output price equals 0.47, 0.10, and 0.82 for corn, wheat, and soybeans. Upper estimates of the elasticity of yield with respect to fertilizer equals +0.58, +0.29, and +0.16 for corn, wheat, and soybeans. Yields are found to be quite insensitive to price changes. Fertilizer demands and yields are insensitive to land idled under farm programs.

Stochastic index theory views each commodity price change as an independent observation on the rate of inflation that can be estimated by averaging over all prices. Our methodology estimates both the overall rate of inflation and relative price changes along with standard errors.

We estimate the influence of policy-induced price changes and of technology supply on North Carolina flue-cured tobacco yields. The decline in land rent and effective output price that accompanied a 1965 policy change from acreage allotments to poundage quotas caused a 12 percent decrease in yields. Farmer yields were more responsive to yield-increasing technologies under acreage allotments than under poundage quotas. Annual yield growth was 0.5 percent under poundage quotas and 4.32 percent under acreage allotments. The growth rate decline is attributable to changes in relative prices and to a slowdown in the supply of available technologies.

Consumers' willingness to pay for natural Christmas tree characteristics are estimated. Differences in willingness to pay for characteristics by specie knowledge and lack of specie knowledge are tested. Differences in willingness to pay for characteristics by specie are also tested. The results suggests that willingness to pay measures differ by these separations of the sample and, ceteris paribus, sellers of natural Christmas trees could benefit by altering characteristics in accordance with the results of these sample separation tests.