The debate over a new farm bill has focused on how to spend an additional $73.5 billion in funding for the agricultural budget over 10 years. The House of Representatives, the Senate agriculture committee, and Senators Cochran and Roberts (supported by the Bush administration) have each proposed...

The Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) analyzed the latest U.S. proposal to the Doha round of WTO negotiations (see Appendix 1, U.S. Proposal for WTO Agriculture Negotiations, USTR, October 10, 2005). While the U.S. proposal provides many concrete steps to reduce farm...

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  A survey of organic grain and oilseed producers in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin was conducted to collect information about their demographic characteristics, production and price risk management strategies, yields and losses, and crop insurance decisions. The data are analyzed using a...

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...