In this article, the author reviews intellectual property rights (IPRs), with some emphasis on the protection of agricultural and life sciences innovations. The main institutional features of IPRs are first discussed, along with a brief historical background and an articulation of the main...

Using a unique longitudinal data set on all manufacturing firms in Slovenia from 1994-2001, this study analyzes how firm efficiency changed in response to changing competitive pressures associated with the transition to market. Results show that the period was one of atypically rapid growth of...

Many educators and policymakers have argued for lenient grade promotion policy – even automatic promotion – in developing country settings where grade retention rates are high. The argument assumes that grade retention discourages persistence or continuation in school and that the...

We introduce an easily implemented and flexible calibration technique for partial demand systems, combining recent developments in incomplete demand systems and a set of restrictions conditioned on the available elasticity estimates. The technique accommodates various degrees of knowledge on...

This paper examines optimal policy when agents, private investors and a government, can learn about the economy by observing others. Investors can delay investment in order to exploit future information. Importantly, investors ignore the informational value of their actions to others when...

We study business organization and coordination of specialty-market hog production using a comparative analysis of two Iowa pork niche-marketing firms.  We describe and analyze each firm's management of five key organizational challenges: planning and logistics, quality assurance, process...

Participants in U.S. markets for live cattle increasingly rely on federal grading standards to price slaughtered animals. This change is due to the growing prominence of ﾓgridﾔ pricing mechanisms that specify explicit premiums and discounts contingent on an animal's graded quality...

The Beginning Farmer Center (BFC) was established by the 1994 General Assembly. Objectives include: - coordinating educational programs and services for beginning farmers, - assessing needs of beginning and retiring farmers to identify opportunities for programs and services, and - developing...

Nontariff barriers (NTBs) refer to the wide range of policy interventions other than border tariffs that affect trade of goods, services, and factors of production. Most taxonomies of NTBs include market-specific trade and domestic policies affecting trade in that market. Extended taxonomies...

Many food traits desired by consumers are costly to provide and difficult to verify. A complicating factor is that delivered quality can only be affected stochastically by producers and imperfectly observed by consumers. Markets for these goods will emerge only if supplying firms can be trusted....