This paper examines interactions between market power and agricultural policy in the U.S. wheat flour milling industry using a non-parametric approach. The analysis focuses on marketing loan and pre-1986 deficiency payment programs; farmers' payments from these programs are dependent on whether...

Grain shippers and political figures in North Dakota and nearby states have voiced concern that the dramatic increases in shipments of crude oil by rail have caused service delays and higher costs. We investigate the potential impact of crude shipments on grain markets accounting for harvest...

In this paper we develop a new approach to measuring the gains from economic integration based on a generalization of the Ricardian model in which heterogeneous factors of production are allocated to multiple sectors in multiple local markets based on comparative advantage. We implement this...

"Climate change and the recent COVID-19 pandemic have exposed the vulnerability of global agricultural supply and value chains. There is a growing awareness of the importance of interactions within and between these supply chains for understanding the performance of agricultural markets. This...

This paper examines the extent to which permanent terms-of-trade shocks have an asymmetric effect on private savings. The first part uses a simple three-period model to show that, if households expect to face binding borrowing constraints in bad states of nature, savings rates will respond...

This paper develops a decision-theoretic approach to policy analysis. We argue that policy evaluation should be conducted on the basis of two factors: the policymaker's preferences, and the conditional distribution of the outcomes of interest given a policy and available information. From this...

Proponents of trade liberalization argue that it will force firms to produce closer to the production possibility frontier and that the frontier will move out faster. In particular, plants that export will achieve a higher productivity level. However intuitive the argument, empirical evidence is...

The dismal growth performance of Africa is the worst economic tragedy of the XXth century. We document the evolution of per capita GDP for the continent as a whole and for subset of countries south of the Sahara desert. We document the worsening of various income inequality indexes and we...

Previous work has claimed that monopoly power facilitates the provision of credit, since monopolists are better able to enforce payment. Here, we argue that if relationship-specific investments are required by borrowers to establish creditworthiness, monopoly power may reduce credit provision...