Over the past century and more, research and development (R&D) has contributed to a transformation of the U.S. food and agricultural sectors. R&D has fueled productivity growth, enabling U.S. farmers to do more with less. It has helped U.S. farmers to remain competitive in increasingly...

Recent trends in farm productivity and food prices raise concerns about whether the era of global agricultural abundance is over. Agricultural R&D is a crucial determinant of agricultural productivity and production, and therefore food prices and poverty. In this paper we review past and present...

Commissioned by the CGIAR Science Council and prepared as a Background Paper for the 2008 World Development Report of the World Bank.

In general, reported rates of return to agricultural R&D are high, but questions have been raised about upward biases in the evidence. Among the reasons for this bias, insufficient attention to attribution aspects-matching of research benefits and costs-is a pervasive problem, the magnitude of...

Measures of capital services are used in studies of production and to inform policies related to growth and development. A variety of methods have been used to measure capital stocks and service flows. In this study we review methods commonly used to measure capital service flows, and outline...

Many researchers and commentators underestimate the length and importance of the time lags between initial research investment and ultimate impacts on the development and adoption of technological innovations. In both econometric studies of productivity and ex post and ex ante benefit-cost...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/10/09.

Measures of productivity growth are often pro-cyclical. This study focuses on measurement errors in capital inputs, associated with unobserved variations in capital utilization rates, as an explanation for the existence of pro-cyclical patterns in measures of agricultural productivity. Recently...