Organized exchanges have evolved methods for enforcing contracts, which allow the contracts themselves to be traded at low cost. Theorists have modeled futures contracts as tools for risk management, despite an extensive empirical literature that does not support predictions about bias in prices...

This chapter addresses the analysis of markets for food products that are differentiated by safety characteristics. The first part of the paper surveys the broad array of issues that are involved in food safety and the regulations that have been devised to address them. The next sections of the...

Commodity storage models, developed first within agricultural economics in the tradition of Gustafson (1958), are valuable in helping us understand how prices of storable commodity markets behave, and how they respond to policy interventions. They show that the policy-relevant dynamic effects of...

Inefficiencies in agriculture in Eastern and Central Europe and the Soviet Union contributed to the financial collapse of the socialist system. Yet during the transition, agricultural production has declined. Low profits, high real interest rates, slow progress in reforms in some countries, and...

The movement of labor out of agriculture is a universal concomitant of economic modernization and growth. Traditional migration models overlook many potential interactions between migration and development. Given imperfect markets characterizing most migrant-sending areas, migration and...

This chapter takes an analytical look at the potential role of agriculture in contributing to economic growth, and develops a framework for understanding and quantifying this contribution. The framework points to the key areas where positive linkages, not necessarily well-mediated by markets,...

Explanations are provided for why governments do as they do in agriculture. Alternative frameworks are assessed to explain government policy including collective action and politician-voter interaction models. Several key patterns of policies are analyzed including the "developmental paradox"...

The marketing margin, characterized as some function of the difference between retail and farm price of a given farm product, is intended to measure the cost of providiing marketing services. The margin is influenced primarily by shifts in retail demand, farm supply, and marketing input prices....

The role of expectations in the empirical analysis of agricultural supply is examined under the assumption of separation of expectations and constraints in dynamic decision making. Extrapolative, adaptive, implicit, rational and quasi-rational, and futures-based models of expectation formation...

Three themes are related to women's economic roles in the agricultural household. First the unified family as coordinator of production and consumption over a life cycle. Second the role of separability of production and consumption decisions in the agricultural household that depends on the...