Title of Dissertation: ESSAYS ON DECOMPOSITION ANALYSIS Amparo Palacios López, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation directed by: Professor Ramón López Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics Chapter 1 shows the implications of credit and labor market imperfections on gender differences in agricultural labor productivity, especially highlighting how both imperfections negatively affe...

Effective Microorganisms (EM) is a commercially available liquid containing a variety of lactic acid bacteria, yeasts and phototrophic bacteria. These organisms create conditions which favour mutual support and enable them to outcompete harmful pathogens, while producing useful substances such as vitamins, enzymes, hormones, amino acids and anti-oxidants that create a reducing environment. Vari...

Agricultural producers face a multitude of preand post-emergence input application decisions, including herbicides, insecticides, plant growth regulators and harvest aids. Many of these inputs are applied on a repetitive basis, resulting in multiple trips across the field and increased chemical, labor and application costs. Variable rate technology (VRT) for self-propelled, boom-type agricultur...

the aims of this study were to investigate the energy flow and its modeling in shablon cultivar of plum production in golestan province of iran. data were collected through questionnaires and also interviews with producers. cobb-douglass model and sensitivity analysis were used to determine the effects of energy inputs on plum yield. the results revealed that the total energy inputs and energy ...

Nitrogen balance in agroecosystems provides a quantitative framework of N inputs and outputs and retention in the soil that examines the sustainability of agricultural productivity and soil and environmental quality. Nitrogen inputs include N additions from manures and fertilizers, atmospheric depositions including wet and dry depositions, irrigation water, and biological N fixation. Nitrogen o...

The main motivation for this paper is the recognition of the fact that asymmetric information in the form of moral hazard and adverse selection results in sizeable efficiency losses. These costs are passed back to producers in the form of excessively high premium rates and also passed back to the government via the crop insurance subsidy program. A secondary motivation stems from a recent debat...

ABSTRACT-Due to the important role productivity plays in future decision making and programming, the productivity indexes should have accurate quantities. In this study, Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) methods are applied to time series of 1978-2008 to accurately measure total factor productivity (TFP) in the agricultural sector of Iran. The comparison of these...

Energy carriers are one of the most important inputs in the agricultural sector. These inputs have been the foundation of the development and transition of the agricultural sector from the traditional stage to the industrial stage. The energy per capita marginal consumption in Iran’s agricultural sector is 3.2 times greater than its global average. Therefore, it is essential to save and optimal...

Using data from two post-frontier rural settings, Nang Rong, Thailand (N=2,538) and Chitwan Valley, Nepal (N=876), this paper examines agricultural push factors determining the outmigration of young people age 15 to 19. We focus on different dimensions of migration, including distance and duration. Our study examines a wide array of agricultural determinants, each with its own potential effect ...