Pork production has been evolving from relatively small, family-run operations toward large-scale operations with several employees. This study uses a national survey of pork producers and their employees to answer several questions about the structure of wages and benefits in this rapidly...

A long-standing puzzle in labor economics has been the positive relationship between wages and firm size. Even after controlling for worker's observed characteristics such as education, work experience, gender, and geographic location, a significant firm size wage effect averaging 15 percent...

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...

The EPA has imposed mandatory refuge requirements for Bt crops to prolong the efficacy of Bt. Growers have no economic incentive to plant the required refuge because refuge crops are on average less productive and more risky. This paper evaluates refuge insurance—insurance thatpays indemnities...

The EPA has imposed mandatory refuge requirements for Bt crops to prolong the efficacy of Bt. Growers have no economic incentive to plant the required refuge because refuge crops are on average less productive and more risky. This paper evaluates refuge insurance--insurance that pays indemnities...

Past empirical literature provides strong evidence that competitionincreases when new firms enter a market. However, rarely have economistsbeen able to examine how competition changes with the threat of entry.This paper uses the evolution of the zip code level market structure offacilities-based...

The Slovenian transition represents a slow but steady liberalization of constraints on competition. Using a unique longitudinal data set on all manufacturing firms in Slovenia over the period 1994-2001, this study analyzes how firm efficiency changed in response to changing competitive...

Growth in the meat packing and processing industry in the Midwestern United States has generated a significant amount of debate regarding the costs and benefits of this type of economic development. This research employs 1990-2000 proprietary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics'’...