Purpose – Malting barley is an important specialty crop in the Northern Plains and growers mitigate risk with federally subsidized crop insurance and production contracts. The purpose of this paper is to quantify risks growers face due to “coverage gaps” in crop insurance that result in...

There are enormous challenges to understanding cause-and-effect relationships among complex and dynamic systems. This article describes how systematic interactions among research, policy decisions, and evaluation of these decisions help develop and implement a multiyear federal research program...

Many of the North American railroads have introduced differentiated services for grain shipments in the past decade. Most interesting have been innovations in guaranteed railcar service which have evolved since their inception. In most cases, pricing and allocation of these services have used...

This article uses a unique data set to analyse economic factors that explain firm exit and the interrelation across firms in space when exiting. Results show the effectiveness of modelling spatial correlation in a logit exit model. Indeed, in our application, reliable statistical results could...

Ultimately what is being challenged is the impact of the patenting system, and the interpretation of certain anticompetitive practices. William W. Wilson & Bruce Dahl, North Dakota State University

In this paper we outline initial concepts for an immune inspired algorithm to evaluate price time series data. The proposed solution evolves a short term pool of trackers dynamically through a process of proliferation and mutation, with each member attempting to map to trends in price movements....

Because of reduced stockholding, Chinese domestic corn markets are becoming much more interdependent with the rest of the world. As China's economy continues to transition from centrally planned to market oriented, internal pressure for increased use of market mechanisms in trading corn and...