Recent theoretical work on agricultural contracts has utilized agency theory. Most of this work considers a moral hazard problem, and assumes that producers are homogeneous, so that there is no adverse selection problem. We utilize a sample of producer performance under a broiler production...

This paper investigates the relationship between a country's political-economic and institutional environment, and its ability to implement sustainable economic reform programs. The policy issue on which the study focuses is inflation stabilization. It consists principally of econometric...

Few micro-level empirical papers have addressed the impact of the patent system on industry structure. Using firm-level patent data for public and private firms in plant biotechnology, we develop a measure of patent enforceability. Duration models show that patent statistics are a useful...

Recent studies have presented different views on the relationship between interest rates and commodity prices. The theory of storage and arbitrage approaches fully incorporate nominal interest rates in commodity price spreads. Alternative frameworks admit a relationship between the interest rate...

The prospect that the nations of Central and Eastern Europe may soon join the European Union (EU) raises a number of questions concerning the treatment of agriculture under the treaties of accession. In order to analyze the implications of alternative accession scenarios, we construct a...

In the case of U. S. agricultural policy, this paper shows how governmental intervention can be formally incorporated in a conditional-vector-error-correcting model. From the resulting theoretical framework and empirical analysis, formal hypotheses are tested regarding both forward and backward...