In the United States, public universities may choose to license a plant variety to a limited number of producers (an exclusive license) or to an unlimited number of producers (an open license). This choice has implications for the quantity and distribution of total benefits from the variety....

Commodity levies are used increasingly to fund producer collective goods such as research and promotion. In the present paper we examine theoretical relationships between producer and national benefits from levy‐funded research, and consider the implications for the appropriate rates of...

The literature on measuring the size and distribution of returns to research has paid increasing attention of late to questions that require a multimarket framework. These questions include the distribution of benefits among stages of a multistage process or among factors of production (i.e. the...

Econometric studies of the effects of research on productivity have typically imposed arbitrary restrictions on the length and shape of the R&D on productivity and the estimated rate of return to research. This paper argues that the useful stock of public knowledge depreciates, if at all, only...

Transgenic crops are relatively new technologies being adopted rapidly in the United States and in a few other countries. The economic impacts of these technologies have, thus far, been estimated in a piecemeal fashion. The purpose of this study was to collect and characterize the economic...

Selected Paper presented at the 57th annual conference of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, Sydney, February 5-8, 2013.

We use newly constructed data to model and measure agricultural productivity growth and the returns to public agricultural research conducted in Uruguay over the period 1961–2010. We pay attention specifically to the role of levy-based funding under INIA, which was established in 1990. Our...

How much has food abundance, attributable to U.S. public agricultural R&D, contributed to the high and rising U.S. obesity rates? In this paper we investigate the effects of public investment in agricultural R&D on food prices, per capita calorie consumption, adult body weight, obesity, public...