Organized exchanges have evolved methods for enforcing contracts, which allow the contracts themselves to be traded at low cost. Theorists have modeled futures contracts as tools for risk management, despite an extensive empirical literature that does not support predictions about bias in prices...

Commodity storage models, developed first within agricultural economics in the tradition of Gustafson (1958), are valuable in helping us understand how prices of storable commodity markets behave, and how they respond to policy interventions. They show that the policy-relevant dynamic effects of...

Investments in R&D and agricultural innovations have been fundamental to long-term economic growth worldwide. But global resource allocation has been uneven, with some developing countries closing in on developed-world scientific capacities, others regaining ground lost over the past decade or...