Over the past two decades, the financial services industry has experienced a significant increase in competition and internal rivalry. Driven by deregulation and advances in information technologies, many historical institutional distinctions among financial intermediaries have disappeared or...

This paper explores the current status of contract farming in China by examining data from a survey of Chinese householders. The survey indicates that the actual proportion of householders engaged in contract farming is relatively low and significantly less than the proportion of householders...

This paper compares three approaches to using attitudinal data to describe heterogeneous preferences for non-market goods. Two latent class models and one random parameter logit model are included. Each model makes different assumptions about the role of attitudes in the decision process....

In this paper, multivariate spatial autoregressive model of local public expenditure determination is developed. The empirical model is developed based on maximization of community utility function. The model is estimate by efficient GMM using Appalachian counties and the results indicate...

The paper examines growth in the U.S. agricultural sector under the conditions hypothesized by endogenous growth theory. Public capital and R&D in agriculture are explicitly considered to capture the effect of public inputs. Results support some of the necessary conditions for this hypothesis to...

The Grant-in-Aid Program is a State sponsored seed grant program whereby the State of Minnesota provides the University of Minnesota approximately $2 million annually to fund new faculty research. Recently, the Graduate School engaged in an internal review of the Grant-in-Aid program. The...

Voluntary donations to non-game species protection through state income tax checkoffs are analyzed. An analogy between the contingent valuation method and check-off scheme is drawn by observing the existence of agenda effects in the latter. Results reveal that substitution and sequencing effects...

We present a theory of vehicle choice where utility depends on the vehicle choices made by other consumers. We use parameters from current transportation and public safety data to show that changes in motor vehicle policy may have unexpectedly large or non-existent effects on safety, fleet mix,...

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the technical efficiency of trucking carriers on a national basis by commodity groups for the year 2001. In this analysis, the efficiency measures are estimated using stochastic frontier analysis. Results reveal efficiency measures of trucking carriers...

Since the early nineties, tens of thousands of villages have held elections of their leaders in rural China. Using a recent village survey, this paper empirically examines the impact of election on public goods provision to the rural community. We found that elected officials tend to tax less on...