Download or read book Three Essays on Agricultural Research and Development, Mergers, and Futures Markets written by Mehdi Arzandeh and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three of the most important new trends in agriculture are the evolution of the regimes of intellectual property rights, the ever-increasing market concentration in the plant breeding industry, and the complete migration of agricultural commodity trading to an electronic platform. This dissertation explores the impact of these structural changes in order to provide a better understanding of different aspects of the sector. The first paper of this dissertation examines three major intellectual property rights in the plant breeding industry. The results show that breeders invest less in R&D with a researcher's exemption if variety differentiation is low or knowledge spillover is high. I find that farmers prefer a farmer's exemption in the short run to other IPRs but favour a researcher's exemption or patent in the long run. I also derive the conditions where researcher's exemption can resolve the tragedy of the anticommons and increase R&D investment or create free-riding problem and lower R&D investment. The se4cond paper compares two different merger policies when firms are merging endogenously and engage in R&D. I find that when firms are efficient in conducting R&D, the merger paradox disappears. The results also show that under the "welfare-increasing" merger policy, monopoly is the equilibrium market structure when R&D is very efficient. As R&D becomes less efficient, the equilibrium market structures become less concentrated under the two merger policies. Each merger policy can be global welfare maximizing depending on the efficiency of R however, the "consumer-surplus-increasing" merger policy is optimal for a wider range of parameters. The third paper investigates the contribution of the steps beyond the best bid and ask (BAS) to price discovery in the futures markets. I reconstruct the limit order book (LOB) using market depth data and apply three information share approaches. This is done for live cattle, lean hogs, corn, wheat, soybeans, and the CME E-mini S&P 500 over the period of 23/11/2015 to 31/03/2016. The results show, first, a substantial market depth existing in the steps beyond the BAS, and second, a considerably high contribution to price discovery for the steps beyond the BAS for all the markets studied.