We examine whether cooperatives are characterized by greater trust than investor-owned firms. We survey 2000 Missouri corn and soybean farmers and find that trust and farmer perceptions of trustworthiness and competence are higher in cooperatives than in investor-owned firms and that trust is a...

An analysis of data from the U.S. Biotechnology Study, 1997S1998 reveals that few variables affect public trust in scientists, while variables representing perceived benefits, risks, trustworthiness, and competence affect trust in food manufacturers on matters of biotechnology. Both trust in...

Conventional wisdom holds that a small and decreasing number of hog slaughter firms are using their "market power" to take advantage of U.S. hog producers. Existing studies have simply calculated industry concentration ratios and assumed/asserted that the performance of such a concentrated...

This paper examines agricultural cooperative organizational models from an ownership rights perspective. Building upon property rights and incomplete contracts theories of the firm, the paper adopts a definition of ownership rights comprising both residual claim and control rights. We argue that...

It is commonly argued in the literature that agricultural cooperatives are financially constrained because they are unable to acquire sufficient risk capital to invest in productive assets. This study examines whether agricultural cooperatives' investment is constrained by estimating...

Chinese synthetic fiber capacity is more than 100 times larger than it was just 30 years ago. It represents more capacity than exists in the United States and Western Europe combined and continues to expand each year to serve the growing Chinese textile industry. Historically, the Chinese...