Chinese synthetic fiber capacity is more than 100 times larger than it was just 30 years ago. It represents more capacity than exists in the United States and Western Europe combined and continues to expand each year to serve the growing Chinese textile industry. Historically, the Chinese...

The purpose of this paper is to determine what factor affect trust in scientists and food manufacturers, and to examine how trust in these institutions affects public support for biotechnology. Data from the U.S. Biotechnology Study reveal that benefits from biotechnology and expectations of...

We consider the implications of trends in the number of U.S. farmers and food imports on the question of what role U.S. farmers have in an increasingly global agrifood system. Our discussion stems from the argument some scholars have made that American consumers can import their food more...

Production strategies pursued by households and individuals in a peasant community of the Bolivian Altiplano are shaped by access to resources, social networks and institutions, wealth, and the ability to develop urban rural linkages. In times of climatic stress such as the low rainfall of 1995,...

The paper analyzes the problem of asymmetric information between buyers and sellers in cattle auctions. An illustration is made regarding the vaccinations that the animals receive. Buyers do not know and cannot verify if sellers have vaccinated their animals forcing them to consider...

Conventional wisdom holds that a small and decreasing number of hog slaughter firms are using their "market power" to take advantage of U.S. hog producers. Existing studies have simply calculated industry concentration ratios and assumed/asserted that the performance of such a concentrated...

This paper examines agricultural cooperative organizational models from an ownership rights perspective. Building upon property rights and incomplete contracts theories of the firm, the paper adopts a definition of ownership rights comprising both residual claim and control rights. We argue that...

It is commonly argued in the literature that agricultural cooperatives are financially constrained because they are unable to acquire sufficient risk capital to invest in productive assets. This study examines whether agricultural cooperatives' investment is constrained by estimating...

We examine empirically the relationship between happiness and the ethical decisions of individuals. We use data from the 1995-97 wave of the World Values Survey (WVS) to test the hypothesis that the relationship between happiness and ethics is bicausal in the sense that personal ethics affects...