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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.

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. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.

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. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.

1. Two forces are present in modern economic analysis, the one integrating and the other disintegrating. Disintegrating-that is specializing-factors are predominant. 2. Specialization takes two contrary directions: (a) inward toward more stylized mathematical assumptions; and (b) outward toward the positive contents of institution and culture, with their own localizing and particularizing effects. 3. Professional associations and journals are rapidly proliferating, and specializing along the above two lines.

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. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

Cooperatives flourish when competition is weak and decline when it is robust. Many agricultural cooperatives were, for example, formed during the depression, while many struggle in today’s competitive environment. Factors contributing to the present cooperative stress are many. Maturing capital markets and falling risk premia have eroded cooperatives’ historical borrowing advantage. Declining transportation costs and trade barriers have expanded market boundaries. Healthy returns in equity markets have facilitated the capitalization of investor-owned firms (IOFs), increasing the opportunity cost of holding non-tradable and non-dividend-bearing cooperative equity. The notion that cooperatives should prosper when markets are poorly competitive has long been maintained as the competitive yardstick hypothesis. If cooperative formation is rational when market imperfections arise, we might wonder if dissolution is rational when the imperfections fade. In this article, we show that the answer is yes. More generally, we show that cooperatives would wish to choose from a continuum of cooperative, new-generation, and IOF models as market conditions and interest groups vary. For this purpose, we develop a general organizational framework of the agricultural processing firm, paying attention to the mechanisms distinguishing the cooperative from the IOF structure, the tension between active and retired members, and the influence of competition in raw and finished product markets. Optimality is considered first from the perspective of the cooperative member, in terms of maximizing the expected present value of net cash flows, then from the perspec

Many argued during the NAFTA debate that trade liberalization would favor Mexican over U.S. food processors, especially because of lax environmental laws south of the border. We find through an examination of profit functions that productivity growth in Mexico has outstripped that in the United States, suggesting free trade indeed will benefit Mexican suppliers. U.S. pollution regulations have had no impact on the profitability or productivity of U.S. food manufacturing. In contrast, Mexico's swiftly rising environmental standards have enhanced food processors' productivity growth, corroborating the Porter hypothesis. Pollution law, therefore, has favored Mexican over U.S. food processing, but for reasons few had anticipated. Copyright 2002, Oxford University Press.

From the late 1950s through mid-1990s, productivity growth in U.S. grain milling and feed manufacturing has been consistently strong and positive. In grain milling, approximately 15% of the growth is due to size economies. Technical change has been capital-using, increasingly material-saving, and, in recent years, decreasingly labor-saving or increasingly labor-using. The quality of capital has risen relative to that of labor and materials. In all but the baking industry, capital intensification and incentives for plant size growth remain unabated. Copyright 2000, Oxford University Press.

To assess likely producer response to milk price reform, we examine the technology of protein, butterfat, and fluid carrier production on 1,924 U.S. dairy farms. A variant of a hedonic cost model is proposed in which the output aggregator is expressed as a function of total output and of the percentage concentrations of its components. Dairy farmers have responded rationally to artificially low protein prices. Due to the cow's appetite limit, farmers operate in stage I of feed-to-milk production functions; yet protein's marginal cost rises sharply with protein output. Only modest substitutability is evident among feed inputs or milk component outputs. Copyright 1997, Oxford University Press.

A general framework is provided for assessing the technology, cost, and efficient scale of a multiplant, multiproduct firm. We show sufficient conditions for the existence of a plant cost function, and necessary and sufficient conditions for using plant-level data to draw exact firm-level cost inferences. We also distinguish between plant and input nonjointness and show the optimal relation between plant-level and firm-level cost elasticity in a multiproduct setting. The framework is applied to a vegetable processing cooperative, which is found to operate below its efficient scale.

Applied studies of the firm in a risky environment have concentrated either on the firm's technology or on its risk preferences. These models result in generally inconsistent and inefficient parameter estimates. A primal model is proposed which allows a firm's preferences and technology to be estimated jointly in the presence of risk. The model is applied to Iowa corn production and estimated technology parameters are compared with those from other approaches. Modest risk aversion leads to inelastic (even backbending) per-acre supplies and input demands. Yield heteroskedasticity in inputs leads to supply heteroskedasticity in prices, especially for risk-neutral firms.

of the consequences the intervention may portend for natural processes. The economics of biotechnology is a study of poorly observable and poorly predictable events. Although some molecular research is communicable in print, much is vested in the scientist's know-how and transmissible only in person. Even patentable discoveries are constituted as ideas--descriptions of the characteristics and uses of laboratory processes or genetic elements. Decisions about which are real discoveries and which are not, and how many occurred, change with the vagaries of legal philosophy, administration policy, and entrepreneurial strategy. Still more difficult are judgments about the significance of these technical claims. For just as the radical character of the transgenic revolution has boosted the scientist's prestige, it also has militated against the experience necessary for seeing where innovations will lead. Perceptions about the environmental impacts of GM farming and the safety of GM foods must then be hostage to a hundred arguments.