Replaced with revised version of paper 11/01/06.

This study attempts to investigate the effects of exchange rate, soybean price, and ocean freight costs on import demand for U.S. grain with forward-futures markets. The focus is on soybeans. The panel data cover the major exporting markets for U.S. soybeans over the last decade. China and...

While recent studies point towards the importance of institutions, in particular secure property rights, as key determinants of economic growth, options to foster institutional change to make property rights more secure are not well understood. Data from 800 villages all over China on the...

The European Union sugar policies, in place for over 49 years, underwent a first major reform in 2005, yielding to mounting pressures coming from the EU 2004 enlargement, the recent EBA initiative to least developed countries and the recent WTO-panel ruling on EU sugar export subsidies. The...

If adoption of herbicide-resistant seed and adoption of conservation-tillage practices are determined simultaneously, adoption of herbicide-resistant seed could indirectly reduce soil erosion and adoption of conservation-tillage practices could indirectly reduce residual herbicide use and...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/11/06.

Households plan strategically for facing risks associated with livelihood security. Choosing a particular set of coping strategies depends on a number of factors including the types of crisis households face and options available. Often, poor households risk future income generating capacity for...

This paper develops a game-theoretic model of heterogeneous consumers to analyze the effect of cooperative involvement on quality-enhancing product innovation activity, the pricing of food products, and the welfare of the groups involved in the context of a mixed duopoly where an openmembership...

Most existing economic analyses of optimal groundwater management use single-cell aquifer models, which assume that an aquifer responds uniformly and instantly to groundwater pumping. This paper demonstrates how spatially explicit aquifer response equations from the water resources engineering...