Tournaments, Fairness, and Risk

We estimate willingness to pay (WTP) to operate under two types of contracts—tournaments (Ts) and fixed performance-standard contracts (F). Our results are consistent with the notion that subjects having social preferences for fairness and care about risk. That is, when subjects experience greater inequity under tournaments relative to fixed performance contracts, or experience greater revenue risk under tournaments, the gap between WTP for fixed performance and tournament contracts increases, ceteris paribus. Our results provide an explanation for grower dissatisfaction with tournament compensation schemes independent of possible concerns regarding opportunistic behavior by integrators.     

Agroindustrialization, globalization, and international development: An overview of issues, patterns, and determinants

This paper offers an overview for a special issue on agroindustrialization, globalization, and international development. It sets out a conceptual framework for understanding the links among these three broad phenomena and then discusses emerging issues and evidence concerning the factors conditioning agroindustrialization in developing countries and the subsequent effects on employment, poverty, and the natural environment. We conclude with a research agenda.     

Renters,landlords, and farmland stewardship

Are farmers better stewards of the land they own than the land they rent from others? We answer this question using a data set that identifies Ontario farmers’ conservation practices on their own land as well as the land they rent. Using a fixed‐effects regression approach, we find that the role of tenure varies for different types of conservation practices. Farmers were found to be just as likely to adopt a machinery‐related practice such as conservation tillage on their rented land as that land which they own. On the other hand, farmers were found to be less likely to adopt site‐specific conservation practices such as planting cover crops on rented land. However, this effect diminishes as the expected length of the rental relationship increases when the landlord has a farming background.     

Crop research,biotech canola,and innovation policy in Canada: Challenges,opportunities, and evolution

Increased investment in agricultural research could contribute to sustainable development goals and benefit farmers, consumers, the environment, and the economy. This paper provides recent evidence and a critical assessment of the evolving Canadian canola crop development and innovation policy and compares it to the wheat and pulse sectors that differ in degree of biotechnology adoption, seeded acreage, intellectual property rights, and private sector involvement. This study also assesses how crop characteristics and technological changes affect future optimal public policy. A number of innovation policies are discussed that could stimulate further growth within the crop sector.     

Remittances,monetary institutions,and autocracies

ABSTRACT

How do remittances affect the choice of exchange rate regimes? Previous research shows that remittances, by easing the ‘impossible trinity’, increase the probability of governments adopting fixed exchange rates. However, that research overlooks the conditioning effect of monetary and political institutions. We argue that remittances, by altering recipient governments’ incentives to use monetary policy counter-cyclically, make central bank independence a credible anti-inflationary tool in less credible regimes; that is, autocracies. Thus, autocracies that receive remittances do not need to rely on fixed exchange rates. In this way, remittances open policy alternatives for developing autocracies. Statistical tests on a sample of 87 developing and transitional countries between 1980 and 2010 support our argument.     

Tenants, Landlords, and Soil Conservation

It has long been argued that tenants tend to overexploit land, but this conventional wisdom has been derived largely without consideration of landlords' actions. We examine what happens when landlords can invest in durable conservation measures in addition to choosing rental contract terms. When tenants are risk neutral, landlords overinvest in conservation under cash rental contracts but can achieve first best levels of output and protection against land degradation when conservation investment is combined with share rental. When tenants are risk averse, the first best is unattainable. In this case, conservation investment combined with share rental results in output levels below the first best, while equilibrium conservation investment may be greater or less than the first best. These results suggest that contract form and conservation investments are likely made simultaneously, so that econometric studies of conservation practice adoption that treat rental status as exogenous are likely subject to bias.     

Risk,learning, and technology adoption

This article explores how decision makers learn and use information, with an application to the adoption of biotechnology in agriculture. The empirical analysis relies on experimental and survey data measuring risk preferences, learning processes, and the adoption of genetically modified (GM) seeds among U.S. grain farmers. While controlling for risk aversion, we link individual learning rules with the cognitive abilities of each decision maker and their actual GM adoption decisions. We find evidence that very few individuals are Bayesian learners, and that the population of farmers is quite heterogeneous in terms of learning rules. This suggests that Bayesian learning (as commonly assumed in the analysis of agricultural technology adoption) is not an appropriate characterization. In addition, we do not find a strong relationship between observed learning styles and the timing of GM seed adoption. To the extent that learning is a key part of the process of technology adoption, this suggests the presence of much unobserved heterogeneity in learning among farmers.     

Incentives, Information Systems, and Competition

We investigate how different competitive regimes affect the ability to provide incentives based on noisy information systems. The set-up involves multiple producers and processors in the presence of moral hazard and adverse selection. Reduced competition may facilitate incentive provision by allowing more high-powered incentives. This may rationalize both vertical and horizontal integration as seen in many agricultural markets with uncertain quality grading. On the other hand, if trading terms are settled before the information is observed, a noisy information system may suffice to give proper incentives. This may rationalize the use of long-term conditional price contracts in the trading of many agricultural products.     

Trade,policy, and food security

Food insecurity is extensive throughout the world and hunger and malnutrition are expected to remain serious humanitarian and political concerns, both in the short term and for the foreseeable future, particularly in low income developing countries where many rural and urban households are both income and asset poor. In those countries, domestic agricultural production is expected to be especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change over the next 30 years. Thus international markets for staple agricultural commodities, which have become increasingly important as sources of nutrition for both developing and developed countries over the past 60 years, are likely to become even more important in the future. Free trade policies allow countries to exploit their comparative advantages in economic activity, increasing average per capita incomes, longer term growth rates and a country's capacity to fund social safety nets for the poor. However, many countries abandoned those policies in favor of domestic protections in their efforts to mitigate the effects of short run food crises. The policy challenge is therefore to resolve the tension between optimal long run policies and short run initiatives to address food security concerns.     

Colonialism, planters, sugarcane, and the agrarian economy of Caguas, Puerto Rico, between the 1890s and 1930

This article presents new research on the impact and consequences of the incorporation of Puerto Rico into the American economic sphere of influence and how much change truly took place during the first decades of the twentieth century. As reconstructed here, Puerto Rico's social and economic structure did change after the American invasion. However, a closer look at the data reveals that, contrary to the generally accepted conclusions, land tenure did not become concentrated in fewer hands. Puerto Rico did experience profound changes with the rapid growth of US agribusiness and the penetration of American capital. In the process of arriving on the island, these two interests found a land tenure system in the firm control of local farmers (small, medium, and large). The American invasion and subsequent incorporation of the island into the American economic/political system as a non-incorporated territory provided the conditions for the numerical increase of farms and farmers in the island during the first three decades of the twentieth century.     

河南省土地利用变化特征及其空间格局

[目的]通过分析河南省2011~2016年土地利用变化特征和空间格局状况,以期为日后河南省合理开发、利用土地资源提供一定的理论指导。[方法]基于河南省土地变化特征,通过马尔科夫模型对河南省2011~2016年土地变化特征进行分析,从多个角度揭示该地区土地利用结构变化情况,并对河南省土地空间利用变化进行评价。[结果]河南省建设用地增加幅度最大,耕地、水域用地有不同程度的减少。土地空间变换主要表现为耕地和林地、水域用地、建设用地等土地类型之间的变换。由土地利用综合区可知,不同土地类型转换过程中,草地是转换比率最小的类型。[结论]河南省的各类土地利用之间的矛盾日益激烈,直接或间接地影响社会经济制度、土地政策和土地管理,因此,有必要加强开展土地资源管理和规划、保护生态环境等方面的工作。     

Trust,trustworthiness, and traditional Islamic education

This paper examines traditional Islamic school (i.e. madrasah) attendance as a determinant of social attitudes among secondary-schooled adolescents in rural Bangladesh. Although both recognized and traditional madrasah-enrolled adolescents show greater support for charity, we find no evidence that traditional madrasah attendance promotes “trust in others”. Attendance at recognized madrasahs, which use a state-approved curriculum, however, significantly increases social trust. The madrasah–trust connection is not explained by the role of teachers’ attitudes towards trust or professional background. Nor do we find evidence that the absence of an effect of traditional madrasah attendance on social trust is driven by their geographic locations. Given the differences between the two groups in terms of stated social preferences, our analysis warns against the practice of lumping state-recognized madrasahs and traditional madrasahs into one category.     

Competition, Externalities, and Input Substituting Technologies

The period 1997–2000 saw a rapid global consolidation of crop seed companies. The emerging companies are applying genetic engineering to exploit complementarities and substitutabilities between seed and other crop inputs. This article develops a model of competing technologies where one substitutes for a conventional input. A monopolist may cross-subsidize a technology that substitutes for an input in order to price discriminate between user types. In duopoly, a socially excessive or insufficient share of acres may be subject to an input substituting technology. Welfare improving regulations are identified in the case where a technology substitutes for an externality generating input.     

Reforms,globalization, and endogenous agricultural structures

In this article, I draw lessons from two quasi‐natural experiments (the transition process in former Communist countries and the rapid globalization of food chains) on the optimality of farms and agricultural structures more generally. I argue that (a) the farm structures that have emerged from the transition process are much more diverse than expected ex ante; (b) this diversity is to an important extent determined by economic mechanisms which are influenced by initial conditions and reform policies; (c) non‐traditional farm structures have played an important role during transition because they were optimal to address the specific institutional and structural constraints imposed by the transition process; (d) there is more diversity than often argued in the farms that are integrated in global food chains; (e) endogenous institutional (contracting) innovations in food chains may lock existing farm structures in a long‐run institutional framework; and (f) indicators based on farm structures are not a good measure of welfare effects of the globalization of food chains.     

Economic growth,convergence, and agricultural economics

After nearly two centuries of lagging behind the industrial countries, growth in many developing countries has surged since the early 1990s. This outperformance has major implications for almost all areas of agricultural economics and, if continued, will likely do so into the future. This article aims to identify the key ways in which the changes in rich and poor country growth rates matter for agricultural economists, as a basis for formulating better research agendas. A key impact arises through sharp increases in demand for agricultural resources as demand for livestock products increases. This changing structure of food demand has important implications for nutrition studies and policies, with the emergence of a double burden of malnutrition. On the supply side, growth in developing countries tends to increase domestic food supply, which is also boosted by increases in research and development spending. Growth in developing countries both stimulates and benefits from increases in infrastructure investment, evaluation of which requires new analytical tools. Negative impacts include the contribution of increased demand for livestock products to global greenhouse gas emissions. In terms of trade policy, growth in developing country is tending to lead to convergence of agricultural policies with the pattern of assistance seen in today's developed countries, raising concerns about the future need to deal with collective action problems, particularly those that increase the volatility of world prices.     

专业化、市场结构与农民收入

专业化农业可通过节省劳动和其他耗费以及积累生产知识而提高农产品的生产效率和质量,使农民通过降低成本、提高竞争力和增加农产品的出售量而获得较高的收入,也可通过专业化发展改善完全竞争型的农产品市场结构,从而在农产品的供应方面创造一个相对垄断的市场结构,促进农民增收。本文主要从理论和实证两个方面对农业专业化与农民收入展开分析。