Accelerating innovation with prize rewards: History and typology of technology prizes and a new contest design for innovation in African agriculture

"This paper describes how governments and philanthropic donors could drive innovation through a new kind of technology contest. We begin by reviewing the history of technology prizes, which operate alongside private intellectual property rights and public R&D to accelerate and guide productivity growth towards otherwise-neglected social goals. Proportional “prize rewards” would modify the traditional winner-take-all approach, by dividing available funds among multiple winners in proportion to measured achievement. This approach would provide a royalty-like payment for incremental success. The paper provides concludes with a specific example for how such prizes could be implemented to reward and help scale up successful innovations in African agriculture, through payments to innovators in proportion to the value created by their technologies after adoption. " from authors' abstractProductivity growth, Technology adoption, intellectual property, Agricultural R&D, Innovation,

Farmland Allocation along the Rural-Urban Gradient: The Impacts of Urbanization and Urban Sprawl

In the vicinity of a city, farmers are confronted with increasing agricultural land prices and rents along the rural-urban gradient, but they concurrently enjoy the advantages associated with proximity to a larger and wealthier consumer base. We hypothesize that farmers transition from low-value, land-intensive \traditional" crops to high-value, labor-intensive \specialized" crops on parcels located closer to urban centers. Once returns to development of a parcel exceed the profits associated with farming, exurban farmers may sell their land for conversion to urban use. Urban pressure in the rural-urban fringe intensifies as cities expand. We differentiate between a gradual process of urban growth (or urbanization) and urban sprawl. Utilizing farmland fragmentation measures as indicators of sprawl, we hypothesize that urban sprawl burdens \traditional" farms to the extent that they accelerate the transition to specialized crops or convert farmland to urban use. We use crop-specific land cover data at the level of grid cells and a state-of-the-art system of spatially correlated simultaneous equations with data for the metropolitan area of Indianapolis, IN and its immediate hinterland. Our initial empirical results corroborate that accelerated urban development around Indianapolis in the 1990s is associated with land uses characterized by fewer field crops and more idle land.land use, urban sprawl, agriculture, specialized crops, spatial econometrics, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Land Economics/Use, C31, O13, Q15, R14,

Going West in the European Union: Migration and EU-Enlargement

Citizens of EU Member States have the fundamental right of free movement within the EU Union, and of freely choosing where to live and work within the EU. However, this right was temporarily constrained for citizens of the new Member States following the enlargement of the EU from 15 to 27 Member States. The severity of restrictions for newcomers varied substantially across the 15 old Member States. This paper analyzes whether the variations in entry restrictions influenced the distribution of migrants across the EU-15 states. To assess the effects of entry restrictions, it models and compares the distribution of migrants across the EU-15 countries prior to the enlargement with that after the enlargement. The analysis uses aggregate data on migrant stocks and migrant flows from the new Member States to the EU-15 states. The results suggest that the migration policies only had a very weak effect and did not create a new migration regime. The destination preferences of past emigrants from the East are by and large replicated by migrants who came after their home countries became members of the EU

Economic impacts of urban growth and urban sprawl on agriculture: A spatial analysis of land use change at the urban-rural fringe

In agricultural regions like the Corn Belt, urbanization tends to take place at the expense of farmland. Dealing with the loss of arable area, increased farmland prices, as well as positive and negative externalities related to the proximity to urban development, leaves farmers with two primary choices: switch to higher value production or sell farmland for development. Over the past several decades, the area expansion of American cities has outpaced population growth due to urban sprawl, which is characterized by low-density residential developments in suburban areas and the urban-rural fringe. This process fragments the periurban agricultural landscape as it progresses outwards. A key aspect of this dissertation is to include metrics of size and dispersion as critical determinants of the returns to agricultural production. We examine the crop allocation decisions of periurban farmers in the extended Indianapolis metropolitan area by estimating a system of simultaneous equations while also allowing for residual spatial autocorrelation. We specifically show that the creation a farmers\u27 market fosters the conversion of nearby farmland to specialized crops. Finally, we use state-of-the-art spatial panel techniques to characterize the determinants of the development of farmland in southeast Wisconsin between 1963 and 2000. Our empirical results indicate that small and dispersed patches of agricultural land use are associated with a higher prevalence of high-valued crops and accelerated farmland loss

Farmland Allocation along the Rural-Urban Gradient: The Impacts of Urbanization and Urban Sprawl

In the vicinity of a city, farmers are confronted with increasing agricultural land prices and rents along the rural-urban gradient, but they concurrently enjoy the advantages associated with proximity to a larger and wealthier consumer base. We hypothesize that farmers transition from low-value, land-intensive \traditional" crops to high-value, labor-intensive \specialized" crops on parcels located closer to urban centers. Once returns to development of a parcel exceed the profits associated with farming, exurban farmers may sell their land for conversion to urban use. Urban pressure in the rural-urban fringe intensifies as cities expand. We differentiate between a gradual process of urban growth (or urbanization) and urban sprawl. Utilizing farmland fragmentation measures as indicators of sprawl, we hypothesize that urban sprawl burdens \traditional" farms to the extent that they accelerate the transition to specialized crops or convert farmland to urban use. We use crop-specific land cover data at the level of grid cells and a state-of-the-art system of spatially correlated simultaneous equations with data for the metropolitan area of Indianapolis, IN and its immediate hinterland. Our initial empirical results corroborate that accelerated urban development around Indianapolis in the 1990s is associated with land uses characterized by fewer field crops and more idle land

GOING WEST IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: MIGRATION AND EU ENLARGEMENT

Citizens of EU Member States have the fundamental right of free movement within the EU Union, and of freely choosing where to live and work within the EU. However, this right was temporarily constrained for citizens of the new Member States following the enlargement of the EU from 15 to 27 Member States. The severity of restrictions for newcomers varied substantially across the 15 old Member States. This paper analyzes whether the variations in entry restrictions influenced the distribution of migrants across the EU-15 states. To assess the effects of entry restrictions, it models and compares the distribution of migrants across the EU-15 countries prior to the enlargement with that after the enlargement. The analysis uses aggregate data on migrant stocks and migrant flows from the new Member States to the EU-15 states. The results suggest that the migration policies only had a very weak effect and did not create a new migration regime. The destination preferences of past emigrants from the East are by and large replicated by migrants who came after their home countries became members of the EU

PRIMARY DETERMINANTS AND THE SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF CORRUPTION

This paper analyzes the spatial distribution of corruption and its primary economic and political determinants. Economic freedom and development are found to lower incidences of corruption. Of notable significance, this study finds empirical evidence of a non-linear relationship between a country’s level of democracy and corruption. Extreme authoritarian regimes are found to have lower corruption levels than hybrid regimes, but past a certain threshold democracy inhibits corruption. More importantly the analysis in this paper finds that the economic and political actions of a country have a significant impact on corruption levels worldwide

Fiscal and Farm Level Consequences of “Shallow Loss” Commodity Support

As with the 2008 Farm Act, the 2012 Farm Act is likely to have some sort of revenue-based support for producers of qualifying crops. Much debate over the negotiations on the 2012 Farm Act focuses on new programs for providing producers with support payments covering “shallow losses” in revenue. The main goal of this paper is to develop an approach to examine the sensitivity of the farmer’s downside risk protection and federal budgetary costs of marginal changes in the deductible in shallow loss program scenarios based on the Average Risk Coverage (ARC) program in the Senate’s April 26th draft of the 2012 Farm Bill. We find that average payments are elastic with respect to the revenue program’s coverage rate. In addition, using this approach, the paper compares payments and their impacts on farm revenue for county and farm level implementations of the revenue program. We find that based on expected payments and impacts on downside revenue risk, producers are likely to prefer the county level implementation of the revenue support program to the farm level version