Conference Papers and Presentations

The purpose of this paper is to undertake a more comprehensive analysis of the impact of climate variables, technology and crop prices on crop yield and on crop acreage in the US using county-specific, historical data for 1977-2007. Specifically, we estimate the yield responses of corn, soybeans and wheat to output prices and to changes in climate and technology over time. We use instrumental variable regression methods to control for endogeneity of prices and county specific fixed effects to control for unobserved location specific effects on yield. We also examine the price responsiveness of total cropland and the own and cross-price elasticities of crop-specific acreage while controlling for climate and other socio-economic factors. Since our empirical framework includes lagged dependent variables and endogenous variables such as crop price, we use the dynamic panel GMM estimation method. We explore the implication of future climate change as projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2001) for crop yields based on our estimated coefficients on climate variables. The main contributions of this study are to examine the impact of climate variables on crop yield and acreage while controlling for a number of other variables using panel data methods. We also provide updated estimates of various price elasticites and productivity growth trends that are critical to examining the extent to which rising crop yields can mitigate the food vs fuel competition for land and the extensive and intensive margin changes likely as crop prices increase.

Risk classification of livestock farms can help stakeholders design and implement risk management measures according to the possessed risk. Our goal is to examine how differently pig farms may contribute to the societal costs of an animal disease outbreak, how valuable this information is to different stakeholders, and how it can be used to target risk management measures. We show that the costs of an outbreak starting from a certain farm can be quantified for the entire sector using bio-economic models. In further studies, this quantified risk can be differentiated so that farms and slaughterhouses internalise the full cost of risk in production decisions and inhibit animal densities, animal contact structures or other characteristics which pose a threat to the sector. Potential benefits due to risk classification could be received by society and producers, and in the long run also by consumers.

During three-hundred-year history of the market economy, the main sources of wealth creation have changed from the natural resources (mainly land and relatively unskilled labor with the exception of the master craftsman), tangible material assets (buildings, machinery and equipment, funds) to intangible assets (knowledge and information of all types) that may be contained in the people, organizations, or physical resources. In the later period of the twentieth century, science has acquired the features of direct production force. The term direct implies that unlike the relationship which existed between science and production in the IXX century, where scientific advances was incorporated through the physical labor in the tools, which, in turn, created new value through the physical labor, the relationship between science and production has become all direct, immediate, because the scientific advances allowed the funds to be produced with less labor and allowed funds itself to become "smarter" and as such to require less human intervention and human physical labor in the final production process. As a result, the need for physical labor continuously declined with time, and the application of labor is moved from direct production to processes of preparing and organizing production. Also, a large part of today's knowledge that is used in production is not embodied in machinery, and the effects of this are immense