This paper examines the role of patents in the development and use of two platform technologies for plant biotechnology - plant transformation techniques and structural genomics. We find that patents were important in inducing private firms to develop these platform technologies. There...

This paper examines the effects of conducting criminal background checks on health care employees on employment in and economic viability of rural communities.

The advent of mad cow disease in Canada in the United States raises numerous concerns regarding consumer reaction to information in the United States. To examine the role of consumer reaction to information we examine the response of price spreads in the U.S. beef market to a Food Safety Index...

Recently several proposals have arisen to replace the current income tax system in the United States with a consumption based or Fair Tax. This study investigates the effect of such a consumption based tax on agricultural investment decisions using stochastic optimal control to model the...

This paper formulates an information measure for changes in asset values and applies the formulation to farmland values in the United States for 1960-99. The results indicate that changes in asset values contained significant information following the Russian wheat sale in the early 1970s and...

Off-farm work improves and reduces the riskiness of household income. Theoretical analyses reveal that the level and riskiness of off-farm income affect demand for farm/nonfarm investments. A two-limit Tobit model is estimated using ARMS data for 1996-2003. The impact on investment behaviour is...

The introduction of mandatory country of origin labeling in the agricultural sector promises to yield consumer benefits by providing additional information to consumers. However, these benefits will be partially offset by the cost of labeling paid by producers. This study derives the labeling...