This paper addressed the puzzling resistance of Presidents of southern African countries to food aid in 2002, given near certain starvation and long-term negative health effects of malnutrition of their constituents. First, I show that NGOs led by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are...

Genetically modified (GM) foods have caused many controversies. One important controversy relates to tolerance?the impurity rate that is tolerated before a commodity must be labeled as genetically modified. Currently, the United States does not have a specific tolerance or threshold level for GM...

Public debate continues over whether the United States should regulate genetically modified (GM) foods by imposing a mandatory labeling policy. This paper develops a model that shows that a voluntary GM-labeling policy results in higher welfare than a regulated mandatory GM-labeling policy, if...

Two interested parties dominate the current debate on genetically modified (GM) foods: environmental groups and agribusiness companies. For the average consumer to arrive at an informed decision on these new foods, they must rely on information from interested parties. Unfortunately, information...

The high and rapidly rising adult obesity rates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand are associated with major health risks, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, and some forms of cancer; large health care costs; and premature deaths annually. For...

An agricultural household model provides the framework for modeling off-farm work participation and off-farm and on-farm work decisions of farm operators. The empirical results are obtained from fitting the econometric model to data from a large national survey. In the estimated structural...

Health, like schooling, is a form of human capital and can be expected to be positively related to labor productivity and labor supply. The production of good health and labor productivity, however, sometimes competes with an individual's lifestyle, e.g., binge drinking. In this study, an...

This paper presents econometric evidence of the effects of economic incentives and institutions on national aggregate private agricultural R&D investments. A model is proposed and fitted to annual data for seven European Union countries, 1984-1995. We find strong impacts of both incentives and...

This paper presents one of the first systematic treatments of economic incentives in the management of academic research and major inefficiencies in common funding mechanisms. Building on well-known but unusual attributes of research whereby the research payoff is only the “"best”" of...

For a postscript copy of this paper, click <a href="/Data/isu/isu285.ps"> here. The paper examines changes in employment and wage patterns, industrial restructuring, and foreign competition that affect opportunities of recent immigrants to the non-metropolitan Midwest, especially to Iowa. The focus is on food and kindred...</a>