Utilizing a comprehensive dataset that includes a sample of 104 countries for corn, 54 countries for soybeans, 82 countries for wheat, and 77 countries for rice and covers the period from 1991 to 2013, we estimate a globally comprehensive but heterogeneous (country-specific) transmission...

We study how two aspects of food insecurity - caloric insufficiency and diet composition - are affected by aggregate economic fluctuations. The use of cross-country panel data allows us to adopt a global prospective on the identification of the macroeconomic determinants of food insecurity....

The role of population density for economic activity was neglected in most part of economic theory. This paper is a review and extension of the previous works of the author in this field. So far, densities did not become common economic variables in economic analysis, and two countries with...

Economists have a good understanding of intra-economic interdependence and a mature methodology of modeling it. Ecologists focus on the complex and sensitive interactions of species in ecosystems. This paper's objective is to suggest a new micro-foundation of ecosystem analysis based on economic...

Water is a key input to agricultural production and therefore fluctuations in water availability may impact agricultural productivity and revenue. Climate science tells us that most of these fluctuations are increasingly resulting from intra-year, instead of interyearly, shifts in the timing and...

We examine the investment rule that must be satisfied by an efficient and egalitarian path in a discrete-time version of the Dasgupta-Heal-Solow model of capital accumulation and resource depletion. In the discrete-time model, competitive valuation of net investments in terms of early and late...

Pesticide use in agriculture poses several risks to both human health and non-target agro-ecosystems. Due to lack of information on the monetary value of reducing pesticide risks, it is difficult to perform an economic analysis that addresses social efficiency of policy and draws conclusions...

Existing methods for the measurement of technical efficiency in the dynamic production models obtain it from the implied distance functions without making use of the information about intertemporal economic behavior in the estimation beyond an indirect appeal to duality. The main limitation of...

This paper is the first to provide both theoretical and empirical evidence of farmlandglobalization whereby international investors directly acquire large tracts of agricultural landin other countries. A theoretical framework explains the geography of farmland acquisitionsas a function of...

We extend the emerging literature on spatial frontier models in three respects. Firstly, we account for latent heterogeneity by developing a maximum likelihood random effects spatial autoregressive (SAR) stochastic frontier model. Secondly, to analyze the finite sample properties of a spatial...