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Credible economic research demands discipline and defensible modeling assumptions—both theoretical and empirical—but incentives to strategically shape findings (e.g., p‐hack) can be strong. We examine recent waves of empiricism in economics and the ethical concerns and responses they prompted. Statistical abuses that opportunistically search for significance are often inseparable from conceptual abuses of opportunistic model identification (i.e., p‐hacking writ large). We compare neoclassical with positivist hacking proclivities and explore associated implications for empirical analysis and peer review. Drawing on our experiences, 25 years apart, as AJAE editors we reflect on efforts to evaluate research quality and enhance research transparency. Related Content: What Do you Mean by "Informed Consent"? Ethics in Economic Development Research Related Content: Research ethics beyond the IRB: Selection bias and the direction of innovation in applied economics Related Content: Ulysses' pact or Ulysses' raft: Using pre-analysis plans in experimental and nonexperimental research [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a metric based on Bayesian probability theory to evaluate the determinants of scientific discovery, and use it to assess an international aquacultural research program consisting of a large number of highly varied projects. The metric accommodates not only project variety but a detailed breakdown of the sources of research productivity, accounting, for example, for the contributions of "failed" as well as "successful" investigations. A mean-absolute-deviation loss functional form permits decomposition of knowledge gain into an outcome probability shift (mean surprise) and outcome variance reduction (statistical precision), allowing productivity to be estimated for each of them separately, then combined into a single knowledge production relationship. Laboratory size is found to moderately boost mean surprise but has no effect on statistical precision, while investigator education greatly improves precision but has no effect on mean surprise. Returns to research scale are decreasing in the size dimension alone but increasing when size and education are taken together, suggesting the importance of measuring human capital at both the quantitative and qualitative margins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite widespread awareness that scientific record and grant funding reinforce one another, empirical models of scientific production normally consider laboratory inputs to be exogenous. The present article employs a cross-section of academic bioscientists to examine the mutual relationship between research output and financial support. Information's nonrival character is such that scientific output and funding success cannot be expressed in strictly supply-and-demand terms. We find the typical bioscience laboratory to operate in a range of decreasing returns to scale and to over-invest in laboratory equipment and materials. Publication and funding success strongly reinforce one another, explaining the right-skewed success distributions often observed in science. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Unlike most investor-owned enterprises, cooperatives often have freedom to choose among a variety of firm objectives. Using 2002-2008 plant- and province-level data, we ask in the present article which of several alternative maximands a Korean cooperative rice processing firm pursues. In contrast to earlier studies, farmer-member supply functions are incorporated into the cooperative's optimization framework. We show that only large cooperative firms have operated at efficient scale, while small and medium-sized ones have been scale-inefficient. Because the latter operate where scale returns are increasing, mergers of small and medium-sized cooperatives likely would be cost-reducing and member-return-enhancing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil's economic strategy has shifted hesitatingly during the last several decades from one of producer protection to trade competitiveness. Exploiting the variations these shifts have afforded, we use a sequence of decennial agricultural censuses to examine Brazilian policy implications for agricultural competitiveness and efficiency. Total factor productivity is decomposed into best-technology and efficiency elements, each subject to policy influence. We find technology growth, at 4.5% per annum, to have been extraordinarily high, particularly in the south. But because productivity among average producers has fallen rapidly behind that on the technical frontier, total productivity growth has been a much more modest 2.6% per year. Public agricultural research programs most benefit the country's technological leaders, widening the gap between frontier and average producer. Credit, education, and road construction policies instead narrow that gap. Credit and road programs especially enhance efficiency in the south, where efficiency losses have been greatest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the effects of pool of unskilled workers and immigrants from Mexico on the minimum wage structure and agricultural labor policy of U.S. From the research in Oregon nurseries, it has been found that, mean wage rate prospective workers demand rises with rise in labor demand. It is also mentioned that, rise of unemployment in U.S. reduces the illegal migration from Mexico.

We focus on the agricultural productivity implications of the complex of investment, price, and research policies the Indonesian government has employed since the end of the Green Revolution. In particular, we employ a new 1985–2005 provincial panel dataset together with a stochastic output distance frontier framework to examine how government policies have affected the nation's agricultural productivity, decomposing it into its technical progress and efficiency components. Government's primary contributions to technology growth have come through price and trade policies rather than public research. Most technology growth, however, appears to be due to informal technology diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competitive environments encourage cooperatives to liquidate by distributing equity to their members, often by raising the transfer prices paid for member raw product. We provide a method of detecting when such liquidation activity begins. In the process, we derive the arbitrage-free price bounds of a broad class of forward contracts typical of seasonal and speciality agricultural markets. The bounds are illustrated for the failed Tri-Valley Growers, once the largest fruit/vegetable cooperative in the USA. We show that Tri-Valley began liquidation years before it was detectable through conventional means. Implications are drawn for the expanding competitive pressures accompanying EU enlargement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Life-science research has shifted rapidly from the public to the private sector, raising questions about government's remaining role. We shed light on the issue by employing a dynamic investment-response model to examine the public's impact on industry life-science research effort and success. We find that government expenditures in both basic biological research and agricultural and medical science create substantial spillovers for private firms. The spillovers are, unfortunately, partly nullified by government competition for scarce research inputs. Yet even after accounting for such competition, public investment has been strongly complementary to private investment. Indeed, opportunities created through public research are the principal source of growth in industry life sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic bioscience's rising importance for downstream technology and growing private sector relationships have evoked substantial policy attention. We contribute to the scrutiny by asking how university bioscientists design and finance their research, with particular attention to the mutuality of research portfolio choice and funding success. The analysis requires consideration of other major influences on academic science, including scientific norms, human capital, and institutional environment. Drawing on a national survey of university bioscientists, we find that public financial support encourages more basic investigation and private support encourages more applied investigation. Yet downstream research is only moderately more excludable than upstream. Once research basicness and other program factors are accounted for, neither the next public nor the next private dollar brings significantly more excludable laboratory discoveries. Public money is attracted to applied and excludable research,I and private and public funding crowd each other out at the margin. Professional norms have substantial impacts on the research pursued and financing obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine conditions under which plant-level data can be used to make firm-level inferences about technology, supply, and demand. Global conditions for such reaggregation involve nonjointness restrictions in both the plant and product dimensions. In the neighborhood of the firm’s fixed overheads, however, restrictions may be eased by appealing to a multiplant generalization of Kohli’s notion of almost nonjointness, which we term “almost reaggregation.” While global conditions for almost reaggregation are the same as for full reaggregation, the local conditions outlined are more easily satisfied. Analysts thus are less likely to commit reaggregation bias when firm-level overheads are constant, and can take advantage of this conclusion through judicious model design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many non-native weed pests of food, fiber, and nursery crops pose threats to the U.S. environment and agriculture. We focus on regulations controlling the spread of noxious weeds, and especially the determinants of regulatory differences across U.S. states. With a simple game-theoretic framework, we derive cross-state regulatory congruence as a function of ecological and agronomic characteristics and stakeholder lobbying through political contributions. Empirical results suggest ecological and agronomic dissimilarities drive large cross-state differences in noxious weed regulation. However, evidence of stakeholder interests is statistically and economically significant. Unlike in the seed industry, commodity producers do not favor regulatory uniformity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a monopolistic competition model to investigate effects of international technological convergence on factor rewards, output composition, and welfare. Comparative static analysis indicates technological convergence improves the follower's—but impairs the leader's—international competitiveness. The leader's welfare improves unambiguously; the follower's welfare depends on the relative strength of convergence's income and terms-of-trade effects. We use data from seventeen food industries in thirty countries, 1993–2001, to test these analytical predictions. Evidence of convergence is found in thirteen of seventeen industries. Convergence lifts followers' relative wages and global value-added shares. Followers benefit from convergence's positive income effect. Leaders benefit from higher terms of trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Trade Adjustment Assistance Program, created in the Trade Act of 2002, authorizes temporary payments to farmers hurt by import competition. The Act requires petitioning farmers to demonstrate that prices have fallen by at least the statutory minimum proportion, and importantly, as a result of rising foreign competition. With the raspberry industry as an example, we show that credible demonstration of import harm requires an econometric model distinguishing domestic from foreign impacts on U.S. prices. We construct such a model and use it to argue that raspberry producers—and specialty crops in general—will infrequently qualify for program assistance, despite recent apparent evidence of import-induced price damage. [EconLit citations: F140, Q170, Q180]. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Agribusiness 23: 101–115, 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how economists speak collectively with one another and how and why the social structure of that communication has been changing. It is found that there are two forces in modern economic analysis, with one integrating and the other disintegrating. Specializing or disintegrating factors are predominant. Two contrary directions are taken by specialization, inward toward more stylized mathematical assumptions and outward toward the positive contents of institution and culture. These developments have implications for the ways in which economists organize and communicate their work.

This article examines the determinants of activity choice affecting forest use among low-income households in Malawi. Data from three villages are used to estimate a system of household labor share equations for maize production, forest employment, and non-forest employment. A system estimation approach is used to identify factors influencing the competing and synergistic livelihood strategies which households undertake at the forest margin. Results from constrained maximum likelihood estimation indicate heightened incentives to degrade forests when returns to forest use are high. Factors reducing forest pressure include favorable returns to non-forest employment, secondary education of the household head, and wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine sources of productivity in bioscience research and graduate training in U.S. universities. For this purpose, we first identify the scientific publications cited on agricultural biotechnology patents, and then trace the citations back to the universities producing the cited research. Insight is thus gained into the university investments that demonstrably influence useful technology. Life-science budget allocations substantially affect both graduate education and technology-relevant science. Graduate training shows decreasing returns to budget scale, while productive research shows decreasing returns in the short run but increasing returns in the long run. Training is a weak substitute for research, while research is a moderate complement to training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers develop a general organizational framework of the agricultural processing firm, paying attention to the mechanisms distinguishing the cooperative from the investor-owned firms (IOF) structure, the tension between active and retired members, and the influence of competition in raw and finished product markets. Farmers supplying both the cooperative and IOF want their cooperative to adopt the retain policy maximizing the present value of combined cash flows from both companies. It examines the welfare implications of alternative cooperative capitalization policies under alternative assumptions about the IOF's finished-goods market power. An equally important issue in modern cooperative policy is the extent of the cooperative's willingness to assume an IOF-style financial structure. During the past three decades, however, the U.S. economy has moved decisively in the competitive direction. Trade restrictions have been reduced, freight markets deregulated, and local market contestability enhanced through improved preservation and transportation technology. It is important under these conditions to examine cooperative behavior in a competitive rather than a monopoloid environment.

The average quality of agricultural biotechnology patents appears to have declined substantially during the past two decades. This quality deterioration may reflect either a decline in the significance of new inventions or an increased use of patents as “protective thickets” against competitors' challenges to more important discoveries. Either way, patent proliferation may be boosting the transaction costs in intellectual property markets, imperiling intellectual exchange and hence technical progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology structure and change in the beer, wine, and spirits industries are examined here in a dual cost framework. Productivity growth in these industries has been strong and uninterrupted for the past four decades, outstripping that in the general food sector. Scale economies continue to be significant in brewing and distilling but are weak to nonexistent in winemaking. Substitution between raw materials and value-adding (labor and capital) inputs is high, implying that any reversal in factor price trends likely will bring substantial changes to production processes. Despite recent rapid increases in relative capital prices, technical change has shifted capital-material expansion paths toward capital, suggesting that new equipment is designed for its ability to save on raw material and packaging cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A supply and demand model of the Israeli hotel industry is developed, distinguishing between its domestic and foreign sectors. Model simulations are employed to examine the impacts of war and terrorist incidents on tourist activity and hotel revenues. Foreign demand for Israeli hotel stays is highly price-elastic and income-inelastic, and moderately sensitive to terrorist events. Domestic demand is price-inelastic, income-elastic, and terror-insensitive. In the wake of terror attacks, hotels' supply or minimum prices to Israeli tourists shift downward, reducing local market prices and encouraging more local tourism. However, the magnitude of these shifts is minor, and the local market thus provides little buffer for dropoffs in foreign tourism. By permitting excess capacity in such fashion, hotels respond rationally to the price inelasticity of local demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the technical and technology change in the meat processing industries in the U.S. Decline in productivity growth rates; Relationship between business cycle and capital prices; Enhancement of incentives for firm and plant-size growth.

Because of the nature of assembly-line operations, one would expect technologies in manufacturing firms to differ in systematic ways from those in many other types of firms. Identifying such differences can therefore be useful in the formulation and testing of restrictions to flexible functional forms. In the present paper, I characterize a multiproduct manufacturing firm and use the characterization to formulate testable hypotheses about the firm's technology, cost function, and profit function. I argue that manufacturing enterprises exhibit a form of almost nonjointness in input quantities and prices in which the individual sub-technologies have quasi-fixed proportions. Substitution across product lines is responsible for the substitutability between material and value-adding inputs that we often observe in aggregate data. Neglecting the special structure of manufacturing technology can seriously bias estimates of aggregate productivity growth rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We reflect on the use of state power in state-owned enterprises. An African case study is first recounted in which a private coffee exporting firm seeks to compete against a government-owned monopoly marketing board. A principal theme of the study is that state enterprises retain de facto control of their markets long after surrendering any de jure monopoly privileges. Managers of the state firm and their supervisors within the civil service form a coherent lobbying group whose interest is to defend the enterprise from competition. With this study as a backdrop, we offer a theory of rent seeking in state-owned enterprises. We argue that state firms in less-developed countries seek to maximize costs within the limits of the subsidies offered them by international donors. Government rent is the difference between such maximized cost and minimum cost. The portion of government rent determined by valuing inputs at competitive factor prices is dissipative in the sense that it vanishes from productive output. Dissipated government rent likely is larger than in the classical (Tullock) rent-seeking paradigm because a state firm's managers have little incentive to limit their rent-seeking activities. Hence, renewed calls for state regulation can be expected once the present deregulation trend has run its course. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Auction bidders may pursue a large number of reasonable bidding strategies, including those that are risk-neutral and risk-averse. Risk-averse bidders are especially tempted by the auction process to discriminate against themselves, that is. to offer prices close to their reservation prices or target prices. Self-discrimination, in turn, usually implies that quality-corrected prices of individual lots trend downward as the sale proceeds. The empirical evidence for downtrending prices at selected yearling steer sales is examined. Implications are then drawn for auction pricing efficiency and equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bernoullian decision theory is used to characterize a firm's willingness to purchase or sell a good under contract. Contract supply and demand functions are then specified in which willingness to contract is related to contract-pricing provisions, to decision maker risk aversion, to open market opportunities, and to other factors. On the basis of these relations, a theory of exchange is proposed which incorporates decision making under risk. Implications of the analysis differ by contract type: cost-plus and fixed-price forward deliverable contracts are emphasized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces an approach for analyzing feeder cattle price differentials. Background on price differentials; Simulation of price differentials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the results of an inventory and evaluation of cooperative extension service programs directed at small farm operators in the southern U.S. Types of individual assistance received by participants during the period of their association with a small farm program; Division of sales volume determinants; Influence of local program resources and field staff training, supervision, and workload on participants' farm sales improvements.

Recent developments in social welfare analysis provide insights into the selection of price policies. In the present paper, a CES social welfare function and a weighted average of utilitarian and leximin rules are used to identify optimal producer prices in an economy where government is the price setter and agents are risk averse. The analysis distinguishes between the interests of commercial producers, peasant producers, consumers, and taxpayers. An application to Zimbabwe indicates that a maize producer price in the low-medium to medium portion of the historical range would be socially optimal if egalitarian preferences are moderate This outcome is somewhat insensitive to group weighting schemes and to interpersonal utility correspondences.

This article analyzes pricing policies for antlerless elk hunting permits in Oregon. Oregon's Department of Fish and Wildlife controls the hunt of antlerless elk by controlling the numbers of hunting tags annually issued for each designated geographic area. The numbers of tags issued are determined by estimating the quantity of hunters needed to achieve the target harvest level of antlerless elk in each area. For one dollar processing fee, prospective hunters may indicate a first and a second choice hunting area from among the 25 areas designated. If applications exceed the number of tags available in the area, a random drawing is conducted to determine the winners. An advantage of a market-clearing price policy is that it results in about as many applications as there are tags available, eliminating the need for a lottery. Unlike under the market-clearing price policy, revenue-maximizing prices would not vary with nontag cost levels provided demand is exponential. This is so because the tag revenue-maximizing price is invariably the vertical distance between demand and marginal revenue curves, which is itself invariant. The analysis makes clear that tag prices are, on average, below prices that would equilibrate demand with the department's exogenously determined tag supplies.

Oregon wine producers recently have developed a niche in the market for premium wines, despite California's established quality image and productive capacity. In Portland, Oregon, the two states' wines are strong demand substitutes for one another. However, the red and white wines of each state are complementary, implying, for example, that if the price of Oregon reds rises, the demand for Oregon reds and Oregon whites is reduced. Red wine demands are much less sensitive to price changes than are white wine demands, corroborating the view that red wine consumers have more discriminating tastes than do white wine consumers. Increases in the state wine tax would bring very little deadweight loss: the dollar value of consumers' utility losses would not greatly exceed the state's revenue gain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Examines the cost and technology of milk component production on U.S. dairy farms. Hedonic econometric framework used to asses the cost and technology of milk component production; Restrictions on commensurable hedonic models; Variables used in hedonic cost analysis and the estimated hedonic cost function parameters for milk component production.

Focuses on the standard production model, in which output is separable and materials enter symmetrically with capital and labor, with microlevel production technologies that are manifestly output-nonseparable and asymmetric. Multiproduct form of Diewert's generalized Leontief framework; Implications of this framework for productivity modeling at the sectoral level; Principal finding.

Seeks to develop a general framework for assessing the cost, technology and efficient scale of a multiplant, multiproduct processing firm. Elements of a multiplant, multiproduct cost models; Multiproduct analog's to the firm's average and net revenue product functions.

Considers alternative primal risk models which permit technology estimation only or permit input demand estimation given a technology or preference structure. Influence of interdependence of marginal yield moments and by the form of utility function; Issues in joint estimation.

Outlines the application of the social welfare approach to policy research. Information on the social choice model; Interpersonal comparisons; Details on social welfare functions.

Production functions have been shown useful for characterizing input effects on both the mean and variability of yield. Monte carlo experiments are used here to investigate small-sample properties of selected mean-variance production functionestimators. Estimation efficiency in the mean is found to improve with iteration on the mean and variance components. Although efficiency in the variance is greatest at the first stage, bias in the variance diminishes through at least the second stage. These effects are influenced by the degree and sign of heteroscedasticity and by sample size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cash returns from farming are expected to be nonnormally distributed under a wide range of joint price-yield distributions. Adequate testing for such nonnormality requires use of proper whitening procedures as well as appropriate statistics. With tests and sample sizes commonly employed, a false imputation of normality often will be made. However, positive correlation between skewness and kurtosis reduces the likelihood of associated decision errors. These results are illustrated with data for irrigated alfalfa and dryland wheat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pricing efficiency in centralized markets is compared with that in noncentralized markets. On the basis of a price formation model, centrally discovered prices are hypothesized to adjust more slowly to equilibrium, but to have lower unpredictable variability, than noncentrally discovered prices. These hypotheses are borne out strongly in market experiments. Mean-squared error is found to be lower in centralized than in noncentralized trading, suggesting centralized markets are the more price efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most agricultural marketing cooperatives distribute members' net revenues on a pool basis. The present paper outlines various pool options and provides a framework for identifying privately and collectively optimal pooling rules. Individual members' pool choices are found to vary according to farm enterprise and risk aversion level. A collectively optimal rule depends generally on risk aversion and on the method used to aggregate individuals' expressed preferences. In the instance examined here, however, the collective optimum is somewhat insensitive to assumed risk aversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the problems in the assessment and achievement of pricing efficiency and the use of information in risky markets. Measures of pricing efficiency; Criterion for the pricing efficiency; Conditions for the fair-game efficiency of a market; Condition to call a market satisfying and efficient.

Presents information on a study which discussed pricing efficiency and the factors that affect it during disequilibrium periods. Manner of testing pricing efficiency; Asymmetry of price discovery process; Presentation of econometric models and results; Conclusions.

Offers a response to criticism on a study which demonstrated the feasibility of deriving joint estimates of a firm's production function and utility function. Account of related studies; Problems with the consistency argument.

Comments on an article about MOTAD analysis in ranking alternative strategies on the basis of expected utility. Discussion on expected utility and estimation risk in MOTAD analysis; Comparison between MOTAD and E-V analysis.

Discusses articles on agricultural biotechnology, published in the December 2003 issue of the "American Journal of Agricultural Economics". Econometric models of the consumer demand for genetically modified products; Political economy of biotechnology for the developing world.

Presents abstracts from selected papers that deal with agricultural production issues based on an international perspective. `Production Efficiency in Ukrainian Agriculture and the Process of Reform,' by Lyubov Kurkalova and Helen H. Jensen; `Intercountry Agricultural Production Functions Revisited,' by Michael A. Trueblood; `Technical and Productive Response to Agricultural Policy Change: An EC Farm Simulation Study,' by Giovanni Giardini.

Presents the second-place prizes in the 'Essay for the 21st Century' competition of the American Agricultural Economics Association (AAEA). Criteria for essay selection; Authors of the essays; Members of the AAEA Essay Committee.

Focuses on the role of price information in the vertical integration and concentration of the agribusiness industry. Responsibility of the government to provide market price information; Development of competitive marketing system; Failure of private reporting firms to present price information.