This analysis identifies and describes clusters of persistently low and high income inequality for N = 7,353 non-metropolitan block-groups in the western part of the North Central Region. Analysis finds more low inequality than high inequality places in the region, but there are also large...

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, urbanization, new technologies, rapid labor-saving productivity growth in primary industries, and improved highways combined to create large-scale regions which are now functionally integrated at the rural-urban level. These forces have raised the...

An entire economic system cannot be understood unless there is reliable knowledge about both rural and urban sectors, including their interactions. In particular, there are two anomalies that cannot be rationalized satisfactorily by existing economic theory: the decentralizing economic...

Since the early 1990s, the retail market for leafy green vegetables has been divided between largely unprocessed products and bagged salads. The latter embody kitchen labor and economize on storage costs, in effect offering consumers convenience as a product attribute. Using time-series retail...

This paper evaluates the role that index funds have played in recent convergence problems of Chicago Board of Trade corn, soybean, and wheat futures contracts. These new market participants are widely considered to have inflated futures prices and/or expanded spreads between futures prices....

The authors estimate the market impact of media coverage related to the name “swine flu,” relabeled subsequently as “2009 H1N1 flu,” on the future prices of lean hogs, live cattle, corn, and soybeans. They then quantified the revenue loss, employing the subset vector autoregressive...

A computable general equilibrium model is applied to evaluate the opportunity costs of not adopting Bt cotton, a genetically-modified (GM) insect resistant cotton, in Benin, Burkina-Faso, Mali, Senegal, Togo, Tanzania, and Uganda when it is adopted in other countries. Our model uniquely employs...