Most empirical studies of the Resource Curse Hypothesis (RCH) find evidence of a strong negative relationship between a country's natural resource abundance and economic growth. We question the reliability of these findings in relation to the definitions and measures used for both resource...

Evaluations of China's stock market range from extremely favourable assessments that emphasise GDP growth rates, financial depth or the rapid growth of privatisation to extremely negative assessments that favour market efficiency or short-term profitability to the exclusion of alternative...

In most developing countries, historically, the main strategy for improving the food sector has focused on increasing farm-level production. But in recent years, with the emphasis on value chain analysis, there has been much more focus on subsector studies, demand-driven approaches, and...

In 2005, Ethiopia implemented a major new social transfer program, the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) that involves some form of work requirement in exchange for either cash or in‐kind transfers (or a mix of the two), with the composition of the transfers administratively set to be...

This paper studies whether a seller achieves higher profits by providing consumers with information that allows them to distinguish between products from different countries, and how mandatory provision of such information impacts welfare. We analyze a model of multi-product monopoly with...

Vaccines against several common foodborne pathogens are being developed and could substantially alter the policy tools available to address foodborne illness. However, little analysis is available to suggest how social welfare would be affected by these new vaccines. To address this void, we use...

To analyze U.S. consumers' brand choices for cheese purchases, we derive a set of discrete-choice models from dynamic utility maximization. ACNielsen Homescan Survey data on U.S. households is used to estimate a dynamic probit model for each of the top brands for cheddar, shredded, and sliced...

"In the last 200 yr, more than 80% of the land in the U.S. Corn Belt agro-ecosystem has been converted from natural perennial vegetation to intensive agricultural production of row crops. Despite research showing how re-integration of perennial vegetation, e.g., cover crops, pasture, riparian...