This study quantifies the effects of student behavior, teacher attributes, and course characteristics on class attendance and performance. Several notable factors that influence attendance and grades are motivation, prior grade point average (GPA), self-financing by students, hours worked on jobs, quality of teaching, and nature of class lectures. This study provides strong empirical evidence of the positive influence of class attendance on student performance. Copyright 1996, Oxford University Press.

This paper develops an econometric model of stochastic production functions to quantify the impacts of climatic variables on the mean, variance, and covariance of crop yields. The estimates of the production function parameters and their elasticities are utilized to analyse the impacts of the projected climate change on agriculture. The results show that the climate change will have modest effects on the mean crop yields, but will significantly reduce the variance and covariance for most of the crops considered. The results have implications for allocations of agricultural land among crops and for crop production mix.

Urbanization in China has been on a steady rise recently, which has contributed to the changing consumer food preferences and consumption patterns. This carries significant implications for food security in China and the global food trade, given the role China plays on global food markets. This study investigates the effects of urbanization on food demand in China by developing a structural framework that incorporates urbanization into a theory-plausible demand system. It also considers the effects of urbanization-induced loss of agricultural land and deteriorating soil quality on food supply. Modeling the demand and supply components simultaneously allows us to undertake equilibrium analysis to determine prices. Based on the urbanization elasticities derived and estimated in this study, our findings indicate that urbanization has reduced demand for grains and fats, while increasing demand for meats, seafood, fruit, vegetables and eggs.

No abstract

This study develops a dynamic price adjustment mechanism for the Canadian chicken industry using a bilateral monopoly framework. The model compares the processors and producers' bargaining strengths in order to determine the equilibrium price of live chickens in Ontario. The theoretical results show how the equilibrium price of live chickens and each party's profit depend on the coefficient of bargaining power. The stochastic properties of price and cost data call for cointegration techniques to infer the bargaining weights. The hypothesis of equal bargaining strengths between processors and producers in Ontario over the 1997-2002 period is strongly rejected by the data. It is shown that chicken processors had greater bargaining power than chicken producers because live chicken prices were highly correlated to chicken producers' average costs. [Econlit citations: C22, L13 and Q13]. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Agribusiness 22: 159-173, 2006.

This study uses nonparametric Malmquist procedures to investigate the temporal and spatial nature of productivity growth and its components in Chinese agriculture over the period 1980-1995. The results of this study indicate that total factor productivity grew at 2.4% annually with technical change augmenting the growth by 3.8% while efficiency change reduced productivity growth by 1.3%. For all provinces, 288 out of a total of 442 cases experienced productivity growth while the rest showed productivity regression during this post-reform period. Coexistence of improvement in technical change and retardation in efficiency change indicates the lack of success in diffusing the existing agricultural technology. Continuing innovation and efficiency improvement through capital investment, modern input use, and greater competitive market pressures are important for augmenting productivity growth in Chinese agriculture.

COVID‐19 has had unprecedented effects on the US economy, in large part because of its effects on workers. Within food and agriculture, these effects pose the greatest threat to the production of labor‐intensive commodities—in particular, fruits and vegetables, the production of which tends to require large numbers of workers for harvesting and packing. We econometrically estimate the effects of COVID‐19 on fruit and vegetable production as the US agricultural labor supply is adversely affected by this pandemic. The major crop losses include $16 million in lettuce, $5 million in apples, and $4 million in grapes.

This study computes technical efficiency for Idaho sugarbeet farms and decomposes it into pure technical efficiency, scale efficiency, and congestion efficiency using nonparametric procedures. The results indicate that the average efficiency is 0.88 with 45% of the farms in the sample exhibiting full efficiency. Improper scale operation and input overutilization are the major sources of inefficiency for remaining farms. Technical efficiency is independent of farm size. A Tobit model was used to examine the impacts of variables such as farm size, specialization, tenancy position, hired labour, location, and managerial ability on efficiency. Inefficiency in sugarbeet production results in a shortfall of potential revenues not only for producers, but also for landlords and processors.