The share of U.S. corn production used to produce ethanol increased from 12.4% in the 2004/05 crop year to over 38.5% in the 2010/11 crop year, and remained at that high level in 2011/12. Even after accounting for return of by-products to the feed market, this is a large and persistent new...

We show that much of Africa's recent growth and poverty reduction can be traced to a substantive decline in the share of the labor force engaged in agriculture. This decline has been accompanied by a systematic increase in the productivity of the labor force, as it has moved from low...

What is the optimal system of intellectual property rights to encourage innovation? Empirical evidence from economic history can help to inform important policy questions that have been difficult to answer with modern data: 1) Does the existence of strong patent laws encourage innovation? And 2)...

This PhD dissertation combines the approaches of economic sociology and sociology of knowledge in order to analyze the social mechanisms underlying the conversion into organic farming. Based on an empirical study and analysis of a complete social network describing the interdependencies among...

Since independence a quiet revolution has taken place in maize production in the Sahel with Mali increasing production more than ten-fold and yields going up ~2% a year. This research work uses farm level panel data from southern Mali's maize growing regions to demonstrate this success in...

The role of twentieth-century agricultural mechanization in changing the productivity, employment opportunities, and appearance of rural America has long been appreciated. Less attention has been paid to the impact made by farm tractors, combines, and associated equipment on the standard of...

This paper investigates the cost of biomass co-firing in European coal power stations. We propose a tractable and original method, that enables us to get expressions of biomass and CO2 breakeven points for co-firing in different types of coal plants. We call them carbon switching price and...

Low adoption of agricultural technologies holds large productivity consequences for developing countries. Agricultural extension services counter information failures by deploying external agents to communicate with farmers. However, social networks are recognized as the most credible source of...

Income growth and urbanization in developing countries have enlarged markets for high-value agricultural commodities. However, there are concerns that lacking access to physical, financial, and human capital, as well as infrastructure and institutions limit the ability of the poor to participate...