One of the major goals of the Sustainable Agriculture Farming initiatives at UC Davis is to provide information about the feasibility of adopting conservation tillage and cover cropping at the farm level. The project includes two tillage schemes: standard tillage (ST) and conservation tillage (CT), and three farming methods: conventional, organic, and winter legume cover crop. All three product...

The aim of this work is to propose a mathematical programming model for the Economic Lot Scheduling Problem (ELSP) with performance decay. The main difficulties related to this model are the nonlinearities and/or nonconvexities associated with the dynamic behavior of the system with time. Firstly, the problem is formulated as a Mixed Integer Non Linear Program (MINLP), which is found to be nonc...

Using state-level data from the United States, we find that initial legal systems in territories originally settled by Great Britain – a common law country – and in territories originally settled by France, Spain, and Mexico and the Netherlands all civil law countries have persistent effects on the quality of contemporary institutions. In order to explain these findings, we develop a transplant...

In the last decade there has been a drastic increase in the penetration of variable generation (VG) such as wind and solar. VG increases the MW variability that must be met in the regulation and reserve markets. If VG penetration levels are allowed to increase without providing additional flexibility in the form of fast response regulation, reserves, and capacity, then the required capabilities...

The central research question in this paper is: what is the relationship between the economic performance of the firm and (i) strategies of being a technological leader versus a technological follower, and (ii) strategies of established technological coherence versus novelty in technological combination? We present a quantitative investigation that enables us to formulate some empirically groun...

We survey and asses the literature on the positive and negative effects of ethnic diversity on economic policies and outcomes. Our focus is on countries, on cities in developed countries (the US) and on villages in developing countries. We also consider the endogenous formation of political jurisdictions and we highlight several open issues in need of further research.

How do state economic development agencies view performance measures and the use of those measures in policy and budget decision-making in the states? This paper extends prior work on performance measurement in state and local governments to the area of economic development. State economic development agencies have frequently been assessed using macro-level measures of economic performance and ...

We develop a con‡ict model linking dissipation to the distribution of the population over an arbitrary number of groups. We extend the pure contest version of the model by Esteban and Ray (1999) to include a mixed public-private good. We analyze how the level of dissipation changes as the population distribution and the share of publicness of the prize change. First, we …nd that, in case of pur...