Since 2006, global prices and price volatility for foodgrain commodities have spiked frequently and dramatically. Such spikes have had the heaviest economic and social impact on developing nations, where agriculture accounts for a sizable portion of economic activity. We demonstrate how US...

We use two approaches to examine the macroeconomic consequences of disruptions in global food commodity markets. First, we embed a novel quarterly composite global production index for the four basic staples (corn, wheat, rice and soybeans) in a standard vector autoregression (VAR) model, and we...

Introduction: agriculture between state and market -- The early battles lost: reaching for regulation, 1920-1932 -- Winning supply management: a new deal for agriculture, 1933-1945 -- Shifting agricultural coalitions: sliding back toward the free market, 1945-1975 -- The decline of the South:...