This paper explores the relationship between shelf prices and manufacturers' coupons for 25 ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. Contrary to the predictions of static monopoly price discrimination, we find the shelf prices for a particular brand in a particular city are generally lower during periods...

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...

Starting in the 1930s, commercial hybrid corn seeds rapidly replaced the once predominant open-pollinated varieties planted by farmers. By the mid-1950s almost all corn grown in the United States was of hybrid varieties. Observers have argued that the drought tolerant qualities of these hybrids...

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...

Many farmers in the developing world lack access to effective savings and storage devices. Such devices might be particularly valuable for farmers since income is received as a lump sum at harvest but expenditures are incurred throughout the year, and because grain prices are low at harvest but...

Extreme heat is the single best predictor of corn and soybean yields in the United States. While average yields have risen continuously since World War II, we find no evidence that relative tolerance to extreme heat has improved between 1950 and 2005. Climate change forecasts project a sharp...

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...

The United States produces 41% of the world's corn and 38% of the world's soybeans, so any impact on US crop yields will have implications for world food supply. We pair a panel of county-level crop yields in the US with a fine-scale weather data set that incorporates the whole distribution of...