Gravity equation models are widely used in international trade to assess the impact of various policies on the patterns of trade. Although recent literature provides solid micro-foundations for the gravity equation model, there is no consensus on how to estimate a gravity equation model in the...

International pork trade has not only been influenced by trade agreements but also altered by consumer perceptions on disease-infected animals. This study uses a gravity model with fixed-effects to investigate how pork trade is affected by foot-and-mouth disease among 186 countries. Results...

Obtaining reliable estimates of insurance premiums is a critical step in risk sharing and risk transfer necessary to ensure solvency and continuity in crop insurance programs. Challenges encountered in the estimation include dealing with aggregation bias from using county level yield averages as...

Econometric estimates of the effect of exchange rate volatility on international trade are mixed and often wildly divergent, resulting in an ambiguous average effect. It is hypothesized that agricultural trade in particular is more sensitive to exchange rate volatility resulting in more...

Selected Paper prepared for presentation at the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association's 2012 AAEA Annual Meeting, Seattle, Washington, August 12-14, 2012. This research was supported by a cooperative agreement with U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Economic Research Service. We thank...

Effective research-project assessment typically is impeded by project variety. In particular, bibliometric approaches to science assessment tend to offer little information about the content of the projects examined. We introduce here a new approach – based on Bayesian theory – of...

There has been much recent interest in the demand for index insurance, the influence of financial literacy on demand for financial products, as well as the positive benefits of experimental games. This paper describes a randomized control trial (RCT) that was performed to understand the effect...