A three period overlapping generations model is developed to investigate the impact of shorter life expectancy due to disease, on human capital investment decisions and income growth. This research is particularly relevant to Sub-Saharan Africa given the dramatic reduction in life expectancy due...

The paper examines growth in the U.S. agricultural sector under the conditions hypothesized by endogenous growth theory. Public capital and R&D in agriculture are explicitly considered to capture the effect of public inputs. Results support some of the necessary conditions for this hypothesis to...

Economic viability of the US corn ethanol industry depends on prices, technical and economic efficiency of plants and on continuation of policy support. Public policy support is tied to the environmental efficiency of plants measured as their impact on emissions of greenhouse gases. This study...

In this study we use data envelopment analysis to decompose the overall economic efficiency of a sample of ethanol plants into three subcomponents: technical efficiency, allocative efficiency and a new component we call marketing efficiency. The relative importance of these sources of efficiency...

Energy is a critical input in production and the main sources of energy in modern economies are exhaustible. Therefore sustaining aggregate consumption across generations requires reduction of the quantity of energy used per unit of output. Energy policies incentivize the deployment of new...

Price volatility and policy changes may compromise the ability of corn ethanol plants to operate above average variable cost and avoid shutdown. This study derives a variable cost function capable of accommodating two features of ethanol plants; 1) some inputs are used in fixed proportions and...

In this paper we revisit the issue on the impact of public R&D expenditure on US agricultural productivity growth. We estimate a dual cost function using a state-by-year panel data set. We construct the potential R&D “spillins” based on both geographical location and production mix. We also...

This study has estimates a Fourier flexible production frontier to examine agricultural productivity in forty-one sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries during 1961-1999. The primary empirical result is that only nine of these countries experienced productivity improvements, while average...

Traditional measures of the benefits of technological change use producer prices. Consumer-oriented measures are more appropriate but they require knowledge of price impacts. They may diverge in the presence of distortions. This paper shows that in general equilibrium they are interrelated...