Boland, Michael A.

April, 2012

Measuring the Benefits to Advertising under Monopolistic Competition

By: Boland, Michael A.; Crespi, John M.; Silva, Jena; Xia, Tian
This paper determines the benefits and costs of firm-level advertising in a monopolistically competitive industry. The model is useful in an environment in which firm-level costs may be absent or imprecise. The empirical example uses data on the advertising for a new line of prune snacks by Sunsweet Growers between 2008 and 2010, revealing average benefit-cost estimates from $1.26 to $4.35 for every dollar allocated to the new product line.
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December, 2009

Leadership Development in Agricultural Economics: Challenges for Academic Units

By: Boland, Michael A.
Crafting and executing strategy are key tasks to be carried out by a manager of an enterprise. Unit leaders are managers of an academic enterprise called a department. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of information collected from interviews with unit leaders of departments of agricultural economics and discuss challenges being faced by these unit leaders in March 2009.
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April, 2006

Input Quality in the Sugar Beet Industry

By: Boland, Michael A.; Marsh, Thomas L.
Using 23 years of data (1978-2000), this study examines seven vertically integrated sugar beet plants representing three different companies in the United States. The objective of this research is to identify the marginal costs of producing sugar beets for vertically integrated sugar beet processors as a way of determining the cost savings from higher quality sugar beets. In doing so, we account for quality differences in the sugar beet input that are used to manufacture the refined sugar output. The results quantify links between high quality sugar beets and lower processing costs.
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December, 1998

ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF PHOSPHORUS – REDUCING TECHNOLOGIES IN PORK PRODUCTION

By: Boland, Michael A.; Preckel, Paul V.; Foster, Kenneth A.
Soil phosphorus levels have increased as pork production has become concentrated. Phosphorus-based manure management regulations for land application have been proposed by policy makers. The objective of this study is to determine benefits/costs of adopting two alternatives for reducing phosphorus: synthetic amino acids or phytase. An optimization model is constructed to determine optimal excreted nitrogen and phosphorus from alternative feed ingredients. Results are derived using different manure storage and application systems. While the two alternatives are not least-cost ingredients, they become profitable when producers are constrained by land. An important result is that the net cost of manure is negative.
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