Modelling an aggregate agricultural panel with application to US farm input demands

tack, b. jesse...[at all];

A recent class of factor demand models is discussed and used to analyse US state-level production data. The approach accommodates output risk, heterogeneous technologies, technological change, endogenous variables, aggregation across agents and more general flexible functional forms than previous models. We find the approach to flexibility found in the consumer literature empirically useful in the analysis of producer behaviour as our results suggest that standard flexible models that have been ubiquitous in agricultural and industrial research are strongly rejected here in favour of a more general and flexible specification. Further, there is substantial heterogeneity of conditional ownprice elasticities across states.