This report explains the principal economic and legal features of a unique set of data on 283 modern private international cartels discovered anywhere in the world from January 1990 to the end of 2005. Measured in real 2005 money, aggregate cartel sales and overcharges totaled about $1.2...

Entrepreneurship is a crucial ingredient of economic growth and job creation. Small business start-ups are currently of great interest to many state and local governments including Indiana. With the growing need to stimulate small business development, it is necessary to understand the obstacles...

Ethanol, the common name for ethyl alcohol, is fuel grade alcohol that is predominately produced through the fermentation of simple carbohydrates by yeasts. In the United States, the carbohydrate feedstock most commonly used in the commercial production of ethanol is yellow dent corn (YDC). The...

This research note documents estimation procedures and results for an empirical investigation of the performance of the recently developed spatial, heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent (HAC) covariance estimator calibrated with different kernel bandwidths. The empirical example is...

“Greed is good.” --Gordon Gecko in Wall Street (1987) “Greed Is Bad.”--Paul Krugman, The New York Times, June 4, 2002 “For many years, Archer Daniels Midland Co.’s philosophy of customer relations could be summed up by a quote from former ADM President James Randall: ‘Our...

The objective of this paper is to determine how the firm's infrastructure, the financial characteristics of a company (net income, sales), and the organizational structure (number of acquisitions, age of establishment of the firm) affect R&D investments in the agricultural sector. We use data...

This paper tests a series of prominent hypotheses regarding the determinants of per-capita income using a novel spatial econometric approach to control for spillovers among neighboring countries and for spatially correlated omitted variables. We use simultaneous equations to identify alternative...

With cellulosic energy production from various forms of biomass becoming popular in renewable energy research, agricultural producers may be called upon to plant and harvest switchgrass or collect corn stover to supply such energy production to nearby facilities. Determining the entire...

We investigate the Philippine government’s price stabilization policy for rice. Seemingly Unrelated Regressions are used to examine the effectiveness of the program at regional and national levels over a 21-year period (January 1983 to December 2003). Results of the regional analysis indicate...

The production and trade of cowpea (Vigna Uniculata), called “blackeyed peas” in the US, are a growing business for farmers and merchants serving the rapidly expanding urban areas of West and Central Africa. Cowpea fits the needs of the urban poor. It is an inexpensive source of protein that...