An econometric model of U.S. and Maine apple production and prices was estimated with ordinary least squares multiple regression. A Gauss-Seidel solution technique was used to examine the equation system goodness of fit and to forecast endogenous variable values. Results indicate that supply expansion in the U.S. and Maine will continue, but Maine's slower rate of increase will erode its market share. Apple prices for the U.S. and Maine are predicted to decline in real terms by the year 2000 if inflation rates exceed 3 percent annually during the period 1982 to 2000.

The current issues of landfill bans, groundwater contamination, waste-end taxes and source reduction of hazardous wastes have rekindled interest in a systems view of environmental management. While this recent interest is new, the basic concept is not. The physical Law of Conservation of Mass as embodied in materials or mass balance has underlain most residuals management research (e.g. Ayres and Kneese [1969]; Kneese and Bower [1979]). As society grapples with the complex problem of toxic and hazardous chemical residues and their distribution in the environment, mass balance is receiving renewed attention in the form of cross-media transfers. The focus of this renewed interest is the movement and transformation of residuals among environmental media (soil, air and water) after discharge. Our early public lessons in applied ecology taught us that the environment is a single integrated system and that there are frequently unintended consequences associated with the human use of that environment. The contemporary lessons from the identification and cleanup of uncontrolled hazardous waste sites under the “Superfund” program lends a new impetus to our reconsideration of these concepts.

We conduct a laboratory experiment to test for the existence of the endowment effect—a gap between willingness to accept and willingness to pay—for improved drinking water quality using a within-subject design. We find a statistically significant and positive gap. Willingness to accept is 62 to 125 cents higher than willingness to pay on average, indicating the presence of endowment effects. This gap is robust to information about the quality of water being consumed. We also identify some heterogeneity in the size of the gaps that is associated with differences in subjects' knowledge of drinking water quality and disparities in their incomes.

Using the public-use files of the Canadian Community Health Survey and a difference-in-differences methodology, we estimate the impact of a universal income transfer (the Universal Child Care Benefit) on food insecurity, separately for adults and children within households. The income transfer reduced the risk of overall food insecurity by 20% at the child level, and the effect was larger in households with lower education or income. The transfer also reduced the likelihood of moderate/severe food insecurity among adults in single-parent families, as well as adults and children in households with secondary education or less. These findings withstand several robustness checks.

We analyze optimal budget allocations to acquire protected areas for carbon storage while balancing risk and return from protection under economic growth uncertainty in a local community. Our study is the first to explore how risk of uncertain economic growth affects cost of protected area acquisition using real estate values at the parcel level, enabling us to estimate the site-specific opportunity cost of carbon storage. The Pareto optimal trade-off frontier between the expected carbon storage benefit and its variance provides a continuum of risk-return combinations. The pattern of the trade-off relationship implies that risk mitigation is less costly in terms of foregone expected benefit when risk is higher than when it is lower. Our results also find that the difference in cluster-specific budget allocations between the strong economic growth scenario and the weak economic growth scenario subsequently decreases between the point of expected benefit maximization and the point of variance minimization. Our findings of optimal hectares of land for protected area acquisition for carbon storage and corresponding benefits and costs serve as an empirically informed knowledge base to help a local community prioritize acquisition of potential protected areas for carbon storage under economic growth uncertainty.

Bolivia has disseminated several improved technologies in the rice sector, but the average rice productivity in the country is far below the average trend in Latin America in recent years. Although the economic literature has highlighted the role of agricultural technology adoption in increasing agricultural productivity, gaps remain in understanding how rice growers are deciding to adopt and benefit from available improved rice technologies. Most previous adoption studies have evaluated the uptake of individual technologies without paying attention to the complementarities that alternative improved rice technologies may offer to farmers who face multiple marketing and production needs. This study uses data from a nationally representative sample of Bolivian rice growers to analyze farmers' joint decisions in adopting complementary agricultural technologies controlling for potential correlations across these decisions, as well as the extent of adoption of these practices. Evidence suggests that the decisions on multiple technology adoption are closely related, with common factors affecting both adoption and the extent of adoption. Furthermore, there is a need to better target resource-poor farmers, improve information-diffusion channels on agricultural practices, and better use existing farmers' organizations to enhance rice technology adoption.

An OLG model with exhaustible resources and solar energy is developed, and equilibrium time paths are characterized numerically using recursive methods. For the parameter values considered, resource prices increase over time, and extractions, output, and utility decline over time until a steady-state is reached. Decreasing the intertemporal elasticity of substitution or raising consumers' subjective discount rate hastens exhaustion of the resource stock. Market equilibrium can result in much quicker use of the stock than social optimality under a constant discount rate, with consequent higher utility for early generations and lower utility for future generations in contrast to social optimality.

The Conservation Compliance provision of the Food Security Act of 1985 requires all farmers who farmed highly erodible land prior to the passage of the Act to have a locally approved conservation plan fully implemented by 1995 or lose eligibility for numerous farm programs. Soil loss estimates of various crop, tillage practices, and conservation practices, however, are stochastic in nature. A farm planning model is suggested that allows for stochastic soil loss estimates. The model is compared to other models used in farm level soil conservation studies. The model shows promise as a more acceptable tool in that the farm plans are more likely to be acceptable to the farmer.

Congress consented to the creation of the Northeast Interstate Dairy Compact in the 1996 Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act. Interest is now growing in expanding this compact and creating new multi-regional dairy compacts. Dairy compacts provide a floor for Class I fluid prices and thus stabilize and enhance farm milk prices in compact regions. This analysis indicates that multi-regional dairy compacts will result in clear economic tradeoffs between dairy farmers, processors, retailers, and consumers. While dairy farmers within the compact region may economically benefit from higher farm milk prices, processors, retailers and consumers in the compact region and dairy farmers outside the compact region will face economic losses.

As we enter a new decade, it seems logical to take stock of the state of our profession and to attempt to assess where we may be heading and what we may be doing in the years ahead. It may be less logical or enlightening to ask a research administrator to make this assessment. Furthermore, I believe that researchers themselves should be identifying the problems and mapping out the new directions. However, there will be certain institutional constraints that will play a significant role in your ability to carry out our research mission; and it is to these constraints that I wish to speak first.

In this paper we estimate the price and income elasticities for five sweet spreads using a two-stage budgeting procedure. The first stage modeled the consumer's budget decision as a Tobit model, where total sweet spread expenditures are based on income and demographic variables. The second stage, including only those households with nonzero first stage expenditures, was treated as a standard consumer allocation problem using the AIDS model. To incorporate population demographics, the AIDS model was expanded by specifying the constant term as a linear function of demographic variables. The coefficients for the prices and expenditures are highly significant and demand is elastic for all five goods. The most significant demographic effects are due to household size, and female food shopper. The theoretical restrictions of homogeneity and symmetry were tested and rejected for the complete system.

Point-of-use/point-of-entry treatment can provide an affordable means for rural residents on private wells to remedy groundwater contamination. Cooperation among homeowners was hypothesized to be a means of further reducing treatment costs due to quantity discounts and avoidance of dealer mark-ups. Data obtained through a mail survey of water treatment firms was used to test this hypothesis. Individual and group purchase, installation and maintenance costs and manufacturer and dealer costs were compared using analysis of variance. Results indicate a cooperative treatment approach may provide benefits due to quantity discounts but little potential exists for savings via direct manufacturer purchase.

Preliminary forecasts using the Box-Jenkins methodology for supermarket scan data for ground beef and roast item movement are described. The functional form and the accuracy of the forecasts vary by product. Results suggest that further analyses incorporating price and advertising may increase the accuracy of the forecasts.

In recent years, many researchers have sought to measure the effects of adolescent soft drink consumption due to a suspected link with childhood obesity and other negative health outcomes. While most studies in the existing literature have focused on physical health outcomes, the current study seeks to analyze how providing soft drinks in vending machines affects adolescent in-school behavior and academics. The data for this analysis comes from a school district in which a subset of schools prohibited the sale of soft drinks in vending machines. Using this subset of schools as a treatment group, students at the treatment schools are compared with students at the schools that did not change their vending machine policies. A difference-in-differences estimation shows that the number of times a student was tardy to class decreased significantly at the treatment schools. Students also were less likely to be referred to the principal's office for behavior problems following the policy change. These results suggest that policies directed toward restrictions on soft drinks in school vending machines might improve behavioral outcomes for students.

Purchasable development rights (PDR) programs are generally considered to provide permanent protection of farmland because development rights are separated from the land in perpetuity. However, the programs do not require that farming activities be maintained in the future. Farming may be discontinued on PDR parcels due to changes in economic conditions or if the parcels are converted to non-farm, rural estates. Such changes may reduce the flow of public goods that citizens seek to obtain by implementing PDR programs. We examine changes in land use on PDR parcels to determine if current activities are consistent with program goals. While changes have occurred in the crops and livestock produced on Rhode Island farms, over time, all of the farms on which development rights were purchased during 1985 through 1999 are currently being farmed by the original owners or by new operators who have either purchased or leased the land.

Insurance rates for crop yield protection programs have traditionally been calculated from county average yields. Where grower acreages and yields are not homogeneous, this approach leads to higher premiums and payouts and greater incidence of adverse selection. With individual grower data a production weighted rate premium calculation method can be used which avoids these problems. Furthermore, the definition of rate classes is not constrained to county boundaries. The additional complication of technical change is addressed and one solution is provided. Results are presented for the cranberry industry.

Control of sediment has become increasingly important as an element of many water quality improvement programs. An analytical method using the universal soil loss equation and linear programming to determine the cost-effectiveness of alternative sediment control practices is developed. Applications of this method to four case study farms and a hypothetical watershed are analyzed. The analyses illustrate the need for developing priorities so as to achieve greatest reduction in sediment losses per dollar of cost. The costs per unit of sediment reduction vary greatly with area, soil, and strategy or technique used.

A two-equation random coefficients model and two estimates of milk prices in the absence of the Northeast Interstate Dairy Compact (Compact) are used to estimate the impact of minimum price regulation for fluid milk products on milk production in the New England states. Estimated responses to price enhancement differed by state for cow numbers, but parameters for milk per cow were not significantly different among states. The amount of increase in milk production attributed to the Compact is estimated at 45 million pounds (about 1% of production) during the first year of minimum price regulation, primarily due to increased milk per cow.