Genetic improvement has been a major contributor to agricultural productivity in the United States, but many questions about the economics of crop breeding, such as the value of pre-commercial germplasm, remain unanswered. This study estimates the marginal value of poorly characterized materials...

There have been numerous episodes of widespread adoption of improved seed and long-term achievements in the development of the maize seed industry in Sub-Saharan Africa. This summary takes a circumspect view of technical change in maize production. Adoption of improved seed has continued to rise...

We examine the distribution of welfare from the introduction of Bt cotton in the United States in 1996. The welfare framework explicitly recognizes that research protected by intellectual property rights generates monopoly profits, and makes it possible to partition these rents among consumers,...

This article uses the method of pairwise comparisons to rank college football teams. This issue is of some importance due to debate over, which team actually won the national championship in 2003-2004. Some polls ranked LSU number 1 while others ranked USC number 1. Our method, based on pairwise...

Following Mann's (National Tax Journal, 33, 189-201, 1980) study, five different versions of Wagner's law are empirically examined using annual time-series data on ten countries over the period 1951 to 1996. Included are three of the emerging industrialized countries of Asia: South Korea,...

This article applies composed error frontier regression techniques to estimate the minimal moments of inertia and radii of gyration for a unique and varied sample of shotguns. We find that minimum inertia depends on weight, center of gravity, length of pull, and barrel length, but not on gauge,...

This paper examines the relationship between financial development and economic growth in Taiwan from 1962 to 1998. Using a four-variable VAR model, the competing hypotheses of demand-following versus supply-leading are empirically tested. The results from Granger causality tests based on vector...