The role played by “speculators” during the 2007/08 food price spike is lively disputed. Our analysis focuses on the increasing participation of index funds in agricultural commodity futures markets before the food price spike. Our central theme is to determine if their prespike massive...

Drawing on the method developed by Just and Pope (1978, 1979), this paper separately analyzes the marginal contributions of both regular input factors and climate factors to mean output and to production risk in Chinese inland aquaculture. Furthermore, the net change in output following a 1°C...

Only few models exist which allow for a regime-dependent spatial price equilibrium. This paper focuses on the price insulating effects of export restrictions. The theory of a Walrasian equilibrium and the spatial price equilibrium theory suggest that export restrictions lead to multiple spatial...

To investigate whether intellectual property rights (IPRs) promote or hinder seed technology diffusion through trade, we use panel data for 134 countries over the period 1985-2010 to evaluate the impact of a country’s IPRs on its seed imports from the U.S. by estimating a gravity equation...