According to New Institutional Economics, transactional activities, governance structures, institutions and beliefs and values are related hierarchally. Williamson (2000) formalizes this framework to show that each governing level must be aligned with the adjacent level for transaction costs to...

The industrialization of agriculture not only alters the ways in which agricultural production occurs, but also impacts the decisions farmers make in important ways. First, constraints created by the economic environment of farming limit what options a farmer has available to him. Second,...

The rise of contract farming and vertical integration is one of the most important changes in modern agriculture. Yet the adoption and diffusion of these new forms of organization has varied widely across regions, commodities, or farm types, however. Transaction cost theories and the like are...

Interviews with Missouri corn and soybean farmers reveal what farmers feel are the most important ethical challenges in agriculture. In contrast to the literature, which characterizes ethical challenges in term of philosophical debates about soil conservation, the use of pesticides and...

We examine empirically the relationship between happiness and the ethical decisions of individuals. We use data from the 1995-97 wave of the World Values Survey (WVS) to test the hypothesis that the relationship between happiness and ethics is bicausal in the sense that personal ethics affects...