The objective of this study is to evaluate South Carolina (SC) consumers' willingness to pay for "SC grown" products. Results indicate that consumers in SC are willing to pay an average premium of 27% for local produce and 23% for local animal products.Premiums for local products are influenced by age, gender, and income.

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of situation and outlook information from World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) in corn and soybean futures markets over the period 1985 to 2006. Results indicate that WASDE reports containing National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) crop production estimates and other domestic and international situation and outlook information have the largest impact; causing return variance on report sessions to be 7.38 times greater than normal return variance in corn futures and 6.87 times greater than normal return variance in soybean futures. WASDE reports limited to international situation information and domestic and international outlook information have a smaller impact. The results show that the impact of WASDE reports has increased over time.

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Producers have a wide variety of risk management instruments available, making their choice(s) complex. The way producers deal with this complexity can vary and may influence the impact that the determinants, such as risk aversion, have on their choices. A recently developed choice bracketing framework recognizes that producers are unable to evaluate all alternatives simultaneously and that to manage a complex task, they often group or bracket individual alternatives and their consequences together in choice sets. Data on 1,105 U.S. producers show that producers do not use all available combinations of risk management tools and that the influence of the determinants of producer's risk management decisions are not necessarily the same across risk management strategies within and across bracketing levels. The findings may help resolve puzzling results on the role that well-known determinants of risk management behavior have on producers' choices, extending knowledge on producers' risk management behavior. Further, the findings have managerial implications for policy makers and agribusiness companies that provide risk management services. [EconLit citations: M000, G1000, Q130] © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc.