The boll weevil spread across the Southern United States from 1892 to 1922 having a devastating impact on cotton cultivation. The resulting shift away from this child labor-intensive crop lowered the opportunity cost of attending school, and thus the pest increased school enrollment and...

In December 2019, the United States and China reached a Phase One trade agreement, under which China committed to purchase more imports from the United States: $12.5 billion more agricultural imports in 2020 and $19.5 billion more in 2021, as compared to 2017. We show that the most efficient way...

This paper estimates the impact of U.S. trade remedy (TR) actions on agricultural trade from 1990 to 2014. Most previous studies of the effects of TR actions have left out agricultural products. We use a four-country oligopolistic trade model to study the impact of TR duties on imports from...

This paper examines the relationship between spot and futures prices for a broad range of commodities, including energy, precious and base metals, and agricultural commodities. In particular, we examine whether futures prices are (1) an unbiased and/or (2) accurate predictor of subsequent spot...

Using data collected by the International Institute of Agriculture, we document the disintegration of international commodity markets between 1913 and 1938. There was dramatic disintegration during World War I, gradual reintegration during the 1920s, and then a very substantial disintegration...

Besides a variety of production and environmental benefits, cover cropping has been advocated as a mean to increase resilience to drought. We explored factors influencing farmer's adoption of cover crops and examined the effects of cover crops on soybean yield and its risk using USDA's 2018 ARMS...

This article calls for a greater integration of moral psychology and political economy. While these disciplines were initially deeply intertwined, cross-disciplinary exchange became rare throughout the 20th century. More recently, the tide has shifted again - social scientists of different...

Regulation consists of rulemaking and enforcement. Economic theory offers two complementary rationales for regulating financial institutions. Altruistic public-benefits theories treat rules as governmental instruments for increas- ing fairness and efficiency across society as a whole....

Economics and ethics both offer important perspectives on our society, but they do so from two different viewpoints - the central focus of economics is how the price system in our economy values resources; the central focus of ethics is the moral evaluation of actions in our society. The rise of...