Farmers, especially small and marginal, do not directly trade in agri-futures market in India. Their small size, lack of trust and understanding of futures market and dependence on middlemen, are some of the main deterrents. The role of Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) is crucial in this...

Purpose: This study examines agricultural lending by commercial banks and the competition they face from the Farm Credit System and non-traditional lenders, including merchants, dealers, and other input suppliers. Design/methodology/approach: We construct a measure of commercial banks' perceived...

Rural indebtedness and dependence on private moneylenders is an age-old problem in India. For more than 100 years now, the Central Government and the Reserve Bank of India have been making efforts to enhance institutional credit in rural areas particularly to assist in agricultural operations....

The process by which scholarly papers are selected for publication in a journal is faced with serious problems. The referees rarely agree and often are biased. This paper discusses two alternative measures to evaluate scholars. The first alternative suggests input control. The second one...

Top5itis is a disease that currently affects the economics discipline. It refers to the obsession of the profession of academic economists with the so-called "top5 journals".

The digital revolution has brought about a wave of technological optimism, sustained by all the things technology does for us in our every day lives. This is in principle good, but it has a dark side, as the poor use of the new technologies may lead us to become lazier and to replace or strain...

We use U.S. county-level data to estimate convergence rates for 22 individual states. We find significant heterogeneity. E.g., the California estimate is 19.9 percent and the New York estimate is 3.3 percent. Convergence rates are essentially uncorrelated with income levels.

We use US county level data (3,058 observations) from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and the extent of government employment at three levels: federal, state and local. We find that increases in federal, state and local government employments are all negatively...

In this paper, whether there is a convergence of per capita incomes across Turkish provinces during 2004-2014 period is examined following the availability of per capita incomes of Turkish provinces for this period as of December 2016. Considering that firms and households of different regions...

We study the dynamics of the cross-section distribution of patents per capita for the 48 continental U.S. states from 1930 to 2000 using a discrete-state Markov chain. We test for and find evidence in favor of the (knowledge) convergence hypothesis as we find that the distribution of patents is...