Rates of obesity among adults and children in the U.S. are soaring, with potentially huge private and social costs. Increasing attention is being paid to agricultural policies as both the culprits through their perceived roles in reducing the relative prices of energy-dense foods, and as the...

Annual data for forty-eight states are used to account for changes in the composition of input and output aggregates over space and time, and thereby to obtain new evidence on changes in inputs, outputs, and productivity in U.S. agriculture. The measures change significantly when we use...

This volumeexamines current agricultural R&D policy, evaluating it in the context of the 100-plus-year history of U.S. public-sector agricultural R&D institutions and expenditures.

Econometric studies of the effects of research on productivity have typically imposed arbitrary restrictions on the length and shape of the R&D on productivity and the estimated rate of return to research. This paper argues that the useful stock of public knowledge depreciates, if at all, only...

Transgenic crops are relatively new technologies being adopted rapidly in the United States and in a few other countries. The economic impacts of these technologies have, thus far, been estimated in a piecemeal fashion. The purpose of this study was to collect and characterize the economic...

Commodity levies are used increasingly to fund producer collective goods such as research and promotion. In the present paper we examine theoretical relationships between producer and national benefits from levy-funded research, and consider the implications for the appropriate rates of matching...

Agricultural research has transformed agriculture and in doing so contributed to the transformation of economies. Economic issues arise because agricultural research is subject to various market failures, because the resulting innovations and technological changes have important economic...