The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate Taiwanese married women's grocery shopping behavior in relation to their labor force participation status. In this study, focus is limited to their grocery shopping frequency which is meant to be a proxy for an input to household production, i.e., food at home. A Poisson switching regression model is developed to estimate parameters of married women's shopping behavior. The results show that the labor force participation status does have a great impact on time allocation behavior.

In the past 25 years, agricultural economists have made significant progress, but have experienced substantial turmoil and great anxiety. These years have been a period of great introspection during which we have asked: “What are the fundamental purposes of our profession?” During this quarter century, rural America's practical problems important to our profession have changed rapidly. This rate will likely quicken in the future. Increasingly, we and our institutions will be challenged to “keep up” and to adjust. How well we respond and serve society will depend greatly on (1) our ability to preceive and to anticipate important issues, and (2) the flexibility of ourselves, our discipline, institutions and funds to accommodate to continual and increasing change.

Technical regulations are increasingly visible in agricultural trade, yet their idiosyncratic nature has limited prior aggregate analysis. This article draws on a unique data source for systematic enumeration of the technical regulations questioned by one exporter among all of its trading partners in mid-1996. Political economy analysis indicates that barriers decrease when the relative contribution of agriculture to an economy increases, when the anticipated future level of protection through other forms of government intervention increases, and when economies are more open. Despite increased scrutiny and discipline by the World Trade Organization, technical barriers remain a significant impediment in world agricultural markets.

Previous research found a positive relationship between concentration and total factor productivity in food manufacturing. One industry (i.e., meatpacking plants [SIC 2011]) was selected for independent analysis due to a relatively sharp increase in concentration in recent years. The methodology chosen was similar to previous studies. Total factor productivity increased 2.4 percent per year, and labor productivity increased 3.3 percent per year for meatpacking plants over the 1958–82 period. Concentration in meatpacking did not positively or negatively affect total factor productivity or labor productivity over the 25-year study period.

Complete agricultural trade liberalization between the United States and the European Union is examined with respect to the agricultural sector. A static, partial equilibrium model, distinguishing among the European Union, the United States, and a politically passive rest of the world, is used to simulate agricultural free trade. The results of this research reveal how European Union and United States adoption of free trade affects domestic and world prices, production, consumption, self-sufficiency, and welfare.

Recent patterns of rural land use in Georgia have stressed urban aggrandizement and the transformation of a significant portion of the available rural land into forests. The area covered by commercial forests in Georgia has increased 21 percent over the past quarter century to the point where two out of every three acres in Georgia are presently growing tree crops. During the 1958-68 decade the proportion of land in farms in Georgia fell from 31.3 percent to 27.0 percent, representing a withdrawal of approximately 1.6 million acres from farm use. As a partial consequence of this shift in rural land use patterns, the price of farm land over the past ten years has increased more rapidly in Georgia than in any other state but one.

The objective of this study was to determine whether structural change in the demand for butter, margarine, and salad and cooking oils occurred between 1967 and 1986. A nonparametric method, which does not require that a functional form be imposed on the data, was used to test for violations from stable, well-behaved preferences. Violations were found, but they were small in magnitude. Therefore, the results failed to show strong evidence that consumption patterns for butter, margarine, and oils were inconsistent with stable preferences.

Conservation initiatives in the 1985 Farm Bill affected farmers' decisions regarding soil conservation. A farmer survey was conducted and a multi-period mixed-integer programming model was developed to determine an optimal farm plan with choices of crop-tillage combinations and land retirement Results indicate that farmers' incentives to reduce soil loss in the Sand Mountain region in Alabama are not substantially affected by provisions of the 1985 Farm Bill. The bid price for the Conservation Reserve Program will have to be considerably higher than 1988 levels to provide an incentive to remove land from production.

The 50/92 and 0/92reduced planting alternativestives of the 1985 farm bill allow farm program participants more flexibility in making production decisions. Specifically, these provisions relax the incentive to produce inherent in earlier commodity programs that linked deficiency payments directly to harvested acreage. This study examined the value of this additional decision flexibility for crop producers in the Blacklands of Central Texas. The results suggest that the reduced planting alternatives would not be used by, and have no value for risk neutral producers, but have substantial value for risk averse producers who would reduce planted acreage in years when yield expectations are low.

Nonparametric procedures are used to compare technological change in SIC 2011, meatpacking, and SIC 2015, poultry slaughter and processing. There has been a greater increase in total factor productivity in poultry than in the red meats. Evidence also suggests recent differences in the bias of this technological change, with production changes being labor using in poultry and biased towards greater efficiency in the use of live animal inputs in meatpacking.

A risk programming model was developed to evaluate the tradeoffs between risk and expected returns in beef-forage production systems. The specification represents nutrient and intake considerations when allocating forage among cattle enterprises; it also incorporates the various sources of risk facing livestock producers. Efficient ranch organizations were derived for a representative eastern Oklahoma ranch using MOTAD and Target-MOTAD formulations. Diversification of forage enterprises, introduction of cow-calf enterprises, and retained ownership of weaned calves were identified as important responses to reductions in acceptable levels of risk. Results also indicated efficient ranch plans to be sensitive to the risk criteria and producer's willingness to accept risk.

Considering pest management in terms of a set of technology characteristics allows an investigation of various pest-management characteristics and how they relate to a total pest-management package. Employing restricted and unrestricted least squares in this investigation indicates the unique impact individual pest-management characteristics exert on net returns. A Stein-rule estimator is also employed in assessing this impact.

The 1990 Farm Bill contains several measures concerning soil erosion caused by U.S. farmers. Data from a nationwide survey of people conerning their attitudes toward agriculture were used to examine the structure of respondents' preferences for government support-policies to combat soil erosion. Estimates of the influence of socio-economic and demographic variables on policy preferences were computed using a multiple-indicator model. Results show more support for the regulation of soil erosion, including laws and fines, than for government financial support.

The impacts of using export taxes as a price control in a multi-market framework are explored using the cotton and yarn sectors in Pakistan as examples. Results show that the export tax on cotton increased domestic consumption and decreased exports of cotton in Pakistan, transferring income from cotton producers to yarn spinners and the government. There was a social loss to Pakistan in the cotton sector. The export tax on cotton increased domestic yarn production, consumption, exports, and incomes of yarn spinners, but resulted in a large transfer (social loss) out of the yarn sector.

The ability of a farmer or group of farmers in a region to produce a specific product profitably depends on the structure of costs of production and marketing and demands of all competing crops. The final decision to grow a particular product is made on the basis of its profitability relative to profitabilities of other alternatives. Relative profitability of a product changes as technological innovations affect yields, resource requirements and production efficiency. Factors affecting demand for resource inputs and products cause changes in profitabilities. Institutional factors can also necessitate adjustments in farm plans by influencing price and/or production of specific products and thereby affecting the profitability of one product relative to other product alternatives.

The traditional minimum cost feed ration linear programming model is expanded to permit risk management responses to price variability associated with feeding a particular ration across time. The cost minimizing objective function also considers feed costs in a mean-variance (E-V) framework. The model is specified using NRC nutrient requirements and an historic Feedstuffs price series. A decision-maker can choose his/her optimal ration by making tradeoffs between price risk and net income. The results should provide a basis for decision tools that allow livestock producers to manage the net income risk involved in the selection of a feed ration.

Using Missouri Show-Me-Select Replacement Heifers Inc. sale data, this article uses hedonic modeling to assess the marginal implicit values of physical and genetic characteristics, expected performance characteristics of calves, and market factors to bred heifer price. In 2008, a higher quality standard, known as Tier II, was created combining minimum expected progeny difference (EPD) accuracies for a heifer's sire with previous heifer standards. Heifer characteristics and market factors as well as yearling and carcass weight EPDs were found to significantly influence heifer price. Results suggest that Tier II heifers receive a premium compared with traditional Show-Me-Select heifers.

Restrictions on the hyperbolic trigonometric (HT) transformation are imposed to guarantee that a probability density function is obtained from maximum likelihood estimation. Performance of the restricted HT transformation using data generated from normal, beta, gamma, logistic, log-normal, Pareto, Weibull, order statistic, and bimodal populations is investigated via sampling experiments. Results suggest that the restricted HT transformation is sufficiently flexible to compete with the actual population distributions in most cases. Application of the restricted HT transformation is illustrated by characterizing uncertain net income per acre for community-supported agriculture farms in the northeastern United States.

Cycles in beef cattle inventories and prices have been documented as far back as 1880 (Breimyer). The inability to identify optimal herd management strategies in response to fluctuating cattle prices is frequently blamed for the low historical returns received by cattle producers (Farris and Mallett). Cattle producers typically react to rising prices by increasing the size of their breeding herd and liquidating a portion of the herd when prices decline. Long lags between the time a cow is bred and the time her calf is weaned and ready for market make it difficult for cow-calf operators to make optimal long-run production plans. And because a cow has a long productive life, several years are required to evaluate the decision to invest in a larger breeding herd by adding more heifers. During this period, prices may fluctuate drastically, so that with hindsight, the decision to increase the investment in the herd may have been a poor choice. The same problem occurs when the herd is liquidated because of dim prospects of earning an immediate profit from the intact herd. The use of other resources probably does not fluctuate much over the cattle cycle. Bebout discovered that land committed to calf production remains fairly constant even in periods of low profits.