This paper examines the impact of cargo preference requirements, which create market power for domestic shipping companies, on the effectiveness of USAID's Food for Peace emergency food aid program.

This paper examines the avenues interest groups use to influence procurement decisions that are subject to legislative constraints that conflict with the provision of the government service or goods, such as "Buy American Laws." We first explore a theoretical model in which the government agency...

Prices for, and the affordability of childcare has received increased attention since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, concerns have been raised about potential differences in childcare costs and access between rural and urban communities. To address these issues, we combine...

The conventional functional form of the Constant-Elasticity-of-Substitution (CES) production function is a general production function nesting a number of other forms of production functions. Examples of such functions include Leontief, Cobb-Douglas, and linear production functions....

The federal crop insurance program covered more than 110 billion dollars in total liability in 2018. The program consists of policies across a wide range of crops, plans, and locations. Weather and other latent variables induce dependence among components of the portfolio. Computing...