Higher union density (the percentage of employees in an area who belong to unions) is known to raise the wages of union members. We find that in the supermarket industry, higher density locally also leads to higher wages for non-union members. Despite this, workers who are not in unions lose...

Cluster analysis was used to conduct a segmentation analysis of U.S. supermarket shoppers. This study is based on the responses of a sample of 1,000 shoppers concerning the importance of 21 store characteristics in selecting their primary grocery store for the Food Marketing Institute's 2000...

More than one billion adults are overweight worldwide, and more than 300 million of them clinically obese, raising the risk of many serious diseases. Only 3.6 percent of Japanese have a body mass index (BMI) over 30, which is the international standard for obesity, whereas 32.0 percent of...

Commodity price volatility in international markets has been used to justify numerous policy interventions, including the need for buffer stocks and counter-cyclical payments. The common measure of volatility, the standard deviation or coefficient of variation, likely overstates the actual...

Current projections indicate that by 2025, water scarcity will affect over one quarter of the world’spopulation. This suggests that the need to manage water more efficiently will become more pressingduring the next few years as the demand for water increases along with the expansion...

As growth in world trade outpaces the growth in world Gross Domestic Product (GDP), economies are becoming ever more linked through world markets (Helpman, 1998). It is evident that U.S. agriculture is also becoming increasingly affected by changes or economic shocks in world markets and that...

The maintained hypotheses embodied in structural general equilibrium models calibrated to data have tended to make economists and policy makers insecure regarding their empirical foundation. Advances in dynamic general equilibrium (DGE) theory and its empirical application have exacerbated this...

The effect on production, trade and well-being from the granting of market access, removing export subsidies, and eliminating trade-distorting forms of direct support to farmers in WTO member countries is analyzed from a world-wide general equilibrium perspective using the most recently...

This paper analyzes the economy-wide gains obtainable from the allocation of surface irrigation water to its most productive use, and evaluates a decentralized mechanism for achieving this result in a spatially heterogeneous environment. The focus country for the analysis is Morocco. The...

A growth accounting and an econometric exercise are used to provide insights into the evolution of the Taiwanese economy over the period 1966-96. The approach links the GDP function of a multiple sector neoclassical growth model to growth accounting and, subsequently to the estimation of the...