As the Midwest gears up to rapidly add new ethanol manufacturing plants, the existing regional economy must accommodate these changes. There are issues for decision makers regarding existing agricultural activities, transportation and storage, regional economic impacts, and the likelihood of...

This paper applies production theory to define a new set of inputs for U.S. households over the post-World War II period and uses newly constructed data on some of these inputs to fit a complete household-demand system, including inputs of women’s and men’s housework, and seven other input...

With the passage of the federal stimulus bill and the proposal of an infrastructure bonding plan in Iowa to address the state’s looming infrastructure needs, there have also been many announcements from state and federal elected officials about the job impacts that the state will expect.  The...

Many communities are trying to shore up their local economies. One strategy is to work with local industries and with households to increase the amount of purchases that they make from local suppliers of goods and services. This import substitution strategy can yield measurable and significant...

Measuring the net economic impacts of ethanol plants has been problematical: access to good industrial accounts is limited, the sector has historically gone through volatile swings, regional logistical responses to a plant beyond corn inputs are not well understood, and the sector is currently...

In Iowa, both in urban areas and more rural territories, there is a general awareness of sales leakages. These leakages take the forms of out-of-region intermediate input purchases, overall household and institutional imports, and the normal regional competitive losses in small communities to...

This report measures the potential net economic impacts that could accrue to the state of Iowa were it to achieve various levels of fruits and vegetable production and direct and grocery sales to consumers. Two of the scenarios anticipate expanded Iowa production of 37 fruits and vegetables so...

This paper uses dimension asymptotics to study why overfit linear regression models should be compared out-of-sample; we let the number of predictors used by the larger model increase with the number of observations so that their ratio remains uniformly positive. Our analysis gives a theoretical...

We conduct a meta-analysis to statistically explain the variations found in estimated trade effects of technical measures broadly defined (TBT, SPS measures and other standard-like policies), using available estimates from the empirical international trade literature, and accounting for both...

Environmental economists use the value-of-statistical-life (VSL) approach to value mortality changes resulting from environmental improvement. Because of scarce data, VSL estimates are unavailable for most developing countries. Using robust regression techniques, we conduct a meta-analysis of...