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Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy (2010) volume 32, number 3, pp. 456471. doi:10.

1093/aepp/ppq012

Submitted Article From Farm Management to Agricultural and Applied Economics: The Expansion of a Professional Society as Seen Through a Census of its Dissertations From 1951 to 2005
Michael A. Boland and John M. Crespi*
Michael Boland and John Crespi, Department of Agricultural Economics, Kansas State University. *Correspondence to be sent to: E-mail: jcrespi@ksu.edu. Submitted 1 March 2009; accepted 1 April 2010.
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Abstract The authors provide a historical census of all 7,967 graduated doctoral students in agricultural economics from U.S. programs between 1951 and 2005. They provide the rst comprehensive study of the history and current state of the highest degree of the agricultural economics profession, show how the degree and the journals in which dissertation research is published have changed over time, and discuss how the profession has evolved from farm economics to an agricultural and other applied economics elds. JEL codes: A10, A11, Q00.

The American Farm Management Association was founded in 1910 and began publishing the Journal of Farm Economics (JFE) in 1919 to serve those interested in the economic forces and inuences as they operate to affect the business of farming (JFE). In 1968, the association changed its name to the American Agricultural Economics Association, the journal name changed to the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE), and the journals mission broadened to focus on the economics of natural resources and the environment, agriculture, and rural and community development (AJAE). In 2008, a majority of American Agricultural Economics Association members voted once again to change the name of the association, this time to the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA). The vision statement AAEA adopted in 2009 is: The AAEA will be the leading organization for professional advancement in, and dissemination of, knowledge about agricultural, development, environmental, food and consumer, natural resource, regional, rural, and associated areas of applied economics and business (www.aaea.org). Although the name of the AJAE remains unchanged, another journal of the association, the

# The Author(s) 2010. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

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Review of Agricultural Economics (RAE), expanded in scope and was relaunched as the Applied Economics Perspectives and Policy in January, 2010. Are these association and journal name changes important in the broad eld of agricultural economics? In contrast to the AAEA, the American Economic Association has existed without a name change since 1885, and its agship journal, the American Economic Review, has retained this title since 1911. Name changes for journals and associations indicate the changing professional interests of their contributors and members, but can we measure these changes with methods beyond simply surveying members, voting on name changes, or citing conventional wisdom? The AAEAs addition of the words applied economics in its title correlates well with changes in university department names as noted by Perry and with the addition of other emphases, such as natural resources, environment, or management, to departmental names. Mittlehammer denes applied economics as the intersection of methods of analysis, economic history, and history of institutions and professional judgment as applied to real-world problems. Further evidence of a shift in thematic emphases is evident from the transformation of other journal names, such as the change of Southern Journal of Agricultural Economics to Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, and Western Journal of Agricultural Economics to Journal of Agricultural and Resources Economics. It is easy to argue that this broadening scope of the AAEAs name, names of university departments, and related journal titles is in line with the broadening of a discipline once simply known as farm management that focused primarily on the business of farming. But unless we can actually measure how the profession has changed, we are simply assuming the breadth of our association necessitates these changes, and any arguments for or against such changes can be made only from anecdotes. For example, conventional wisdom is that there has been growing professional interest in the past few decades in the elds of natural resources and the environment, but can we actually measure this increase? The transformation of the Review of Agricultural Economics into the Applied Economics and Policy Perspectives seems an apropos time to explain exactly how this profession has changed. One way of measuring these changes is to examine the training of students who earn degrees in areas traditionally associated with agricultural economics. Completion of a terminal degree in our profession results in a dissertation that helps dene an agricultural or other type of applied economist. Therefore our objective is to provide an overview of dissertation research in agricultural or other type of applied economics and the choice of publication outlets for that research. In so doing, we demonstrate how our profession has changed by documenting the areas in which we train our Ph.D. students and how interest in these areas has changed over time. We also contribute to the literature that has examined various aspects of the journal publication process by showing, for the rst time, which of the traditional agricultural and economics journals are publishing dissertationgenerated articles. This research includes data on every U.S. dissertation from 1951 to 2005 in the area of agricultural economics and is the rst comprehensive study of the history and current state of our professions highest degree. 457

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Showing how numbers, topic areas, and positioning of research from these dissertations in the professions journals have changed over time help us quantify the evolution of the farm economics profession to agricultural and applied economics over time.

The Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics over Time


The logical way to begin an examination of a profession is by studying the size of the profession itself. The AAEA has published the names of graduated doctoral students, their dissertation titles, and the dissertations subject categories every year since 1951 in the AJAE and its predecessor, the Journal of Farm Economics.1 Using those sources and University Microlms International in Ann Arbor, Michigan, we created a list of individuals who received doctoral degrees from departments of agricultural economics in the United States from 1951 to 2005. Some universities offer a Ph.D. in economics rather than agricultural economics. However, these universities typically report to the AAEA only those students regarded as earning a doctorate in an agricultural economics eld.2 Furthermore several universities have abandoned their doctoral programs or have graduated only a handful of students (e.g. Montana State University). We elected to include all U.S. departments of agricultural or other applied economics (as dened by Perry) that awarded a Ph.D. in the eld of agricultural economics at some time during the 1951 to 2005 time period. We refer to these as departments of agricultural economics throughout this paper. The compiled dataset has 7,967 doctoral students who graduated from 41 universities since 1951 (table 1), which was as far back as we were able to obtain complete records. It is difcult to know how many doctorates were awarded in agricultural economics prior to 1951. We examined issues of the Journal of Farm Economics published before 1951 but could nd no student numbers reported.
Number of Dissertations over Time

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Iowa State, Michigan State, Wisconsin, and Cal. Berkeley together graduated 25 percent of all doctoral degrees in agricultural economics, but no single program has awarded more than 7 percent of the 7,967 dissertations produced in the United States. In addition, concentration of students in doctoral programs in agricultural economics has been declining. For example, the top 20 programs in terms of number of graduates produced graduated 82 percent of all doctoral students in agricultural economics from 1951 to 2005. In the 1950s, the top four programs in terms of number of graduatesIowa State (84), Wisconsin (79), Purdue (69), and Cornell (64)graduated 44 percent of all Ph.D. students. But in the 1990s the top four programs in terms of number of graduatesCal. Berkeley (108),
Exceptions occurred in 1979 and 1980 when these data were published in the AAEA newsletter. We appreciate the assistance of Louise Letnes at the University of Minnesotas Waite Library for providing us with copies of the back issues of the AAEA newsletter for these two years. 2 For these universities, we analyzed titles of all dissertations. In a few cases, it was difcult to know from the title whether the dissertation was focused on agricultural economics. We erred on the side of caution and included these cases in our data.
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Table 1 The 41 U.S. agricultural economics Ph.D. awarding institutions ranked by number of Ph.D.s awarded in parentheses and shares of dissertations produced from 1951 to 2005 Share (%) 7 6 6 6 6 6 5 5 5 4 4 3 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 2 2 Cumul. (%) 7 13 19 25 31 36 42 47 52 57 61 64 67 70 73 75 78 80 82 83 85 Share (%) 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Cumul. (%) 87 88 89 91 92 93 94 95 96 96 97 98 98 99 99 100 100 100 100 100

School Iowa St. (538) Michigan St. (503) Wisconsin (484) Cal. Berkeley (479) Cornell (454) Purdue (449) Minnesota (436) Illinois (433) Ohio St. (392) No. Carolina St. (353) Texas A&M (309) Oklahoma St. (262) Cal. Davis (248) Kansas St. (235) Oregon St. (217) Missouri (201) Washington St. (188) Florida (180) Penn St. (151) Maryland (139) Hawaii (129)

School Kentucky (128) Virginia Tech. (103) Mississippi St. (101) Nebraska (101) Colorado St. (97) Tennessee (94) Clemson (81) Georgia (74) Louisiana St. (62) Rhode Island (60) Connecticut (59) Utah St. (57) Auburn (46) Massachusetts (38) Texas Tech (29) Arizona (20) West Virginia (20) Montana St. (12) South Dakota St. (3) Wyoming (2) Total (7,967)

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Notes: Arizona, Cal. Davis, Clemson, Colorado State, Georgia, Hawaii, Montana State, Tennessee, Virginia Tech, and Washington State awarded their rst Ph.D.s in the 1960s. Rhode Island and Utah State awarded their rst Ph.D.s in the 1970s. Auburn, Texas Tech, West Virginia, and Wyoming awarded their rst Ph.D.s in the 1980s. All other programs have been awarding Ph.D.s at least since the 1950s. South Dakota State, Montana State, Wyoming, and Tennessee awarded their last Ph.D.s in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, respectively.

Iowa State (98), Illinois (95), and Minnesota (95)graduated only 22 percent of all Ph.D. students.3 Figure 1 shows the number of agricultural economics dissertations awarded each year from these 41 schools compared with the total number of dissertations in the general eld of economics awarded by U.S. institutions. The latter data (available only since 1966) are gathered by the National Science Foundation (NSF) from institutions of higher learning and double count, to a certain degree, the data we collected. Schools such as Iowa State that award a Ph.D. in economics regardless of eld are also counted in the NSF data, but schools that award a degree specically in agricultural economics are not. However, the NSF is adding agricultural economics as a distinct discipline to be monitored in the future. Trends for both degrees were mostly similar from 1966 to 1997, and numbers of both degrees awarded fell from 1997 to 2002. Since 2002, agricultural economics Ph.D.s have continued to drop, but those awarded in economics in general have increased back to their late 1990s highs.
Pieper and Willis also found a decentralization of graduate programs in their studies on agricultural economics programs of the 1990s compared with programs of the 1950s.
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Figure 1 Number of U.S. agricultural economics doctoral graduates and economics doctoral graduates

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Examining the data by decade reveals a sharp increase in the 1950s (710 degrees) and 1960s (1,350 degrees) and then a leveling off of graduates from the 1970s to the 1990s at about 1,800 Ph.D.s per decade. There were 686 total dissertations awarded from 2001 to 2005, and if we simply double this to predict the entire decade of the 2000s, the gures would indicate a 22 percent decline in Ph.D.s from the previous decade. To our knowledge, although there has been discussion in our profession regarding the decline in funding, these data are the rst to reveal a decline in the total number of dissertations awarded.4
Other Dissertations in Agricultural Economics

There are faculty members in departments of agricultural economics who earned their Ph.D.s in economics departments or from agricultural economics departments outside the United States. We collected a secondary data set of agricultural economics graduates from departments other than the 41 listed in table 1. We derived these from two sources: (1) schools other than the 41 included in our study that list their Ph.D. graduates in the AAEA newsletter and (2) the alma mater of faculty in U.S. departments of agricultural economics who received their Ph.D. from a school other than the 41 included in our main study. Data for the second source were obtained from dissertations listed in the AAEA newsletters and from departmental faculty web pages and, therefore, are likely biased toward current faculty.5 The second dataset is incomplete for obvious
A benet of a census of all Ph.D. graduates is that it can serve as a benchmark for other studies using smaller samples. Marchant and Zepeda wrote that the average number of agricultural economics graduate degree recipients doubled from 1986 to 1993. As gure 1 shows, it appears that Marchant and Zepeda may have chosen a low year (1986) and a relatively high year (1993) in terms of number of graduates for their comparisons. Our data reveal that the 1980s through the mid-1990s was a period of relatively regular annual uctuations between 150 and 200 graduates per year and that the number of dissertations awarded began to decline after the mid-1990s. Hence the trend that Marchant and Zepeda noted was short-lived and is now very clearly headed in the opposite direction. 5 Schools in the second dataset include the University of Guelph, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago. Titles (and abstracts if available) were analyzed to determine whether the
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reasons but provides some interesting information to compare with our census of agricultural economics dissertations. The number of these dissertations awarded averaged about nine per year in the 1950s, grew throughout the 1970s and 1980s to approximately 24 per year by the mid-1990s, and fell to an average of around 10 per year since 2001. Hence trends in this second dataset are similar to those for the primary data of U.S. agricultural economics Ph.D.s. We conclude that the recent downturn in dissertations related to agricultural economics is not simply due to a decline in production of these dissertations at the 41 traditional agricultural economics programs.
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Reasons for the Decline in Ph.D. Graduates in Agricultural Economics

Why are U.S. agricultural economics Ph.D.s on the wane? Siegfried and Stock stated that the number of Ph.D.s in economics in general awarded to students who earned undergraduate degrees in the United States fell by half since 1972. Hence the increase in Ph.D.s in economics since that time (gure 1) is primarily due to an increase in degree seekers from students outside the United States. If a high percentage of agricultural economics Ph.D. graduates earned their undergraduate degrees from U.S. institutions, the decline in agricultural economics Ph.D.s may simply be a reection of this general trend. In other words, either agricultural economics departments are not seeing an increase in international students pursuing Ph.D.s or the increase is not enough to make up for the decline in domestic graduates. A second reason is likely a change in the type of jobs available to professional agricultural economists. Between 1996 and 2002, two out of every three dissertations in agricultural economics were awarded to non-U.S. citizens, 19 percent of whom were employed in temporary jobs after graduation, suggesting a soft job market for domestic and international doctoral students (Stock and Siegfried 2006). A third reason may be a change in a departments traditional focus. Washington State University recently merged its agricultural economics department with its economics and nance departments to create the School of Economic Sciences (Leigh, Huffaker, and Shumway). The University of Tennessee eliminated its Ph.D. in agricultural economics in the 1990s but is now contributing to a jointly managed program in natural resources. New Mexico State University has a new program in international development, and North Dakota State University started Ph.D. training in transportation economics. Similarly many programs have combined governance of their doctoral programs with other departments. This is especially true in smaller departments. Universities with Ph.D. programs currently governed by two or more departments are Arizona, Clemson, Iowa State, Kansas State, North Carolina State, Rhode Island, Utah State, Virginia Tech, and Washington State. A change in a departments emphasis from agricultural economics to general economics or sharing the doctoral program must certainly change the marketing of doctoral programs and, hence, doctoral research in agricultural economics.
dissertation focused on agricultural economics. For example, a University of Chicago dissertation titled Labor Supply and Earnings of Farm Families with Emphasis on Off-Farm Work was assumed to be focused on agricultural economics and included in the secondary dataset.

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A fourth reason may be the availability of economic incentives to attend graduate school, especially the potential for future employment. Melichar noted that the number of jobs available for agricultural economists at landgrant universities and in the federal government leveled off in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Cooperative Extension Service was downsized considerably after 1990, and rising federal decits coupled with increased costs for biological research changed the formula funding sources such that Hatch Act and Smith-Lever Act funds declined by 24 percent and 46 percent, respectively, from 1997 to 2005 (Farrell et al. 2007). Norton et al. noted that total formula funds allocated by experiment stations to agricultural economics research declined from 13 to 9 percent from 1974 to 1993, and Farrell et al. (2007) implied that this decline continued into 2005. Much of this was Hatch funding, which had been a primary hard dollar source of graduate student assistantships, but the decline in research funding and general declines in budgets also affected the number of agricultural economics graduate students. Boland reported that 86 percent of the 1,137 doctoral students enrolled in departments of agricultural economics in March, 2009 were on hard and soft funding. Approximately 28 percent (316 students) were hard funded, and the number of graduate teaching assistantships and graduate research assistantships was almost equal. Although these declines in funding are certainly correlated with the drop-off of Ph.D.s awarded since the mid-1990s (gure 1), future research should try to determine the supply of employment opportunities available for agricultural economists over this period. Boland suggested that the increasing age of the profession and retirement patterns should be studied too.

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Dissertations and Journal Outlets


Journal articles are one way that a profession presents its expertise to the world. Simpson and Steele ( p. 325) stated the importance of continual reexamination of the profession, especially by reviewing contributions to professional journals. In this section, we identify and describe how dissertation-spawned articles appear in traditional agricultural economics journals. Several researchers have studied the professional impact of journal publications on salaries in the eld of agricultural economics, and their ndings generally support a signicant positive relationship between publications and salaries (Golden et al.). Just and Rausser surveyed AAEA members to learn more about their attitudes toward the AJAE and professional meetings and found that association members considered the AJAE an important and, in fact, major outlet for completed research, including dissertations. Tauer and Tauer noted that 32 percent of all articles appearing in the AJAE between 1972 and 1981 were written by recent Ph.D. recipients (this gure is for all articles). Hilmer and Hilmer looked at publications of recent graduates. All of these studies considered the importance of published articles in the agricultural economics profession, but whether a graduate publishes a journal article specically from his or her dissertation and, if so, in which of the traditional agricultural and applied economics outlets, have yet to be examined. Because we are interested in how our profession has evolved, it is important to 462

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understand the relationship between the subject matter of a dissertation and the inclusion of that subject matter in at least one of the professions journals. Knowing which journals are outlets for Ph.D. dissertations can tell the profession a lot about where its newest members are positioning their work and whether the themes of the research have changed over time, along with changes in association and journal names. Using the gathered data on dissertation author, title, abstract, and subject, as well as the students year of graduation and alma mater, we tried to link all 7,967 dissertations to at least one published journal article. We used a variety of resources to make these links including the journals themselves (for example, many articles provide acknowledgments of a paper being the product of a dissertation), internet searches including online curriculum vitae, searches conducted with the American Economics Associations search engine EconLit, and, in many cases, personal contacts. Our goal was not to determine how many articles were spawned from a dissertation (a nearly impossible task for our dataset), but our task was still arduous. We classied the journals into ve outlets on the basis of their focus: (1) AJAE: American Journal of Agricultural Economics (formerly the Journal of Farm Economics). (2) Former regionals: Agricultural and Resource Economics Review (formerly North Eastern Journal of Agricultural Economics); Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics (formerly Southern Journal of Agricultural Economics); Review of Agricultural Economics (formerly Illinois Agricultural Economics, North Central Journal of Agricultural Economics); Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics (formerly Western Journal of Agricultural Economics). (3) International and development: Agricultural Economics; Journal of Agricultural Economics; Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics; European Review of Agricultural Economics; Australian Journal of Agricultural & Resource Economics (formerly the Australian Journal of Agricultural Economics); Journal of Development Economics; Journal of Development Studies; Journal of International Agricultural Trade & Development; Journal of International Development; World Development. (4) Agribusiness: Agribusiness: An International Journal; Journal of Agribusiness; International Food and Agribusiness Management Review; Journal of Food Distribution Research. (5) Resource and environmental economics: Journal of Soil and Water Conservation; Journal of Environmental Economics and Management; Marine Resources Economics; Land Economics. The journals in outlet 2, the former regional journals, are of particular interest because they have shifted from being outlets for articles pertinent to their regional associations to national outlets that contain works from authors around the world and no longer focus solely on regional topics. We also examined a 6th outlet, the 73 economics journals in JSTOR (excluding the RAE and AJAE). We found only 13 dissertation-spawned articles published in these journals from 1996 to 2005, so we elected to cease further searching for articles published prior to 1996 and because we believed that it was far more likely that dissertations would be published in economics journals in the most recent time period, given the changing nature of our profession. 463

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Figure 2 Number of dissertation-spawned articles appearing in outlets 1 through 5

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Publication of Dissertations

In part because of the work by Just and Rausser (1984) and Tauer and Tauer (1984), we looked rst to see if a dissertation-spawned article appeared in the AJAE. We acknowledge that this biases our ndings toward AJAE articles. If no AJAE article was found, we determined whether an article appeared in another traditional agricultural economics outlet. As such, we know we are undercounting for cases in which an author publishes more than one article from his or her dissertation. We debated the utility of attempting to count as many articles as possible and decided the present task was onerous enough, given the size of the dataset. Thus our consistent methodology was simply to ask, did a dissertation result in at least one agricultural economics journal publication and, if so, in which journal? Figure 2 shows the numbers of dissertations published in the ve outlets over the period of time included in our dataset. Only the AJAE existed for the entire time frame of our study as the former regional journals (outlet 2) were rst published in the late 1960s and later broadened their titles (and scope) as noted in the outlet list. The number of dissertations resulting in at least one journal article published in one of these outlets is remarkably small. In fact, it is only about 20 percent of the total dissertations, and this rate has been relatively stable over time.

Dissertation Publication Rates

Considering that the ve outlets we created represent the various agricultural and applied economics associations, it is interesting that 80 percent of dissertations result in no articles published in at least one of these outlets. If a published article from a dissertation completed from 1951 to 2005 exists, AJAE is the most likely place to nd it. Specically, 13 percent of dissertations resulted in at least one article in the AJAE from 1951 to 2005. This gure is less than half that reported by Tauer and Tauer (32 percent), although they counted all articles by recent graduates, whereas we counted only one article that must have resulted from a dissertation. The second most favored outlet is one of the former 464

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regional association journals at 6 percent, and each of the other three outlets has a dissertation-spawned publication rate of about 1 percent. Assuming that Tauer and Tauers (1982) gure holds over the entire sample period, our ndings and theirs suggest that recent graduates who publish at least one article from their dissertation in the AJAE are likely to go on to publish another article in the same journal. This is important because many departments hire recent graduates with the expectation they will publish additional journal articles. These two studies along with the recent study by Hilmer and Hilmer (2007) concerning productivity of recent graduates provide evidence that publishing an article based on ones dissertation is a very good indication of ability to publish in the future. What has changed greatly is the share of dissertations published in the AJAE versus other outlets over the time period covered in this study. In contrast to the AJAE, outlets 4 and 5 do not contain the word agricultural in their titles, and outlets 2 and 3 include other emphases besides agriculture or agricultural in their titles. The change in journal names and creation of new journals suggests there was a need for new research outlets for all articles, not just those originating from dissertations. All of the journals in outlet 2 changed their regional appellations between 1991 and 1993, and the market share of outlets 2 through 5 increased markedly from these years forward (gure 2). This is especially interesting in light of our technique of counting the AJAE over other outlets if the dissertation spawned more than one article. The current publication rate for dissertation-spawned research in the AJAE is the lowest it has ever been, at approximately 7 percent from 2001 to 2005, compared with 24 percent in the 1950s. Between 1961 and 1990, the AJAEs dissertation-spawned publication rate hovered at around 14 15 percent. An obvious reason for the current decline is competition. Many of the journals in outlets 2 through 5 did not exist in the 1950s and 1960s (for example, the RAE and its predecessors did not publish its rst issue until 1961). If todays overall publication rate (28 percent) is higher, but the share going to the AJAE is lower, graduates must be nding these new outlets. The increasing publication rates for dissertation-spawned articles in outlets 2 through 5 further support this conclusion. The former regional association journals (outlet 2) surpassed the AJAE in terms of dissertation publication rates in the 1990s and now have the largest share of dissertation-spawned articles. We also examined dissertation-spawned articles by outlet and department. On the basis of the total number of these articles published from 1951 to 2005, the top ve publishers were Iowa State (124), Purdue (120), Cal. Berkeley (120), Cal. Davis (111), and Texas A&M (109).

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Classication of Doctoral Research and Journal Outlet by Subject Categories


This section compares the subject areas of all dissertations with those of dissertation-spawned articles. As the impetus for this study was to describe how our profession has changed over time, one metric of this change is the general subject matter of dissertations. Every dissertation is assigned one of 12 American Economic Association (AEA) subject 465

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classication codes. These are listed in the rst column of table 2. Codes are usually assigned by the graduate student or his or her major professor. For dissertations in our dataset that were not listed in AAEA newsletters or journals (a very small number), we used the title and abstract to assign a subject classication code. Table 2 shows roughly how interest in subject areas has changed over time and in which of the rst ve journal outlets dissertations of particular subjects are most likely to appear if published. We broke the data into the 1951 to 1967, 1968 to 1990, and 1991 to 2005 categories because these were periods when the JFE became the AJAE (1968) and the North Central Journal of Agricultural Economics changed its name to the Review of Agricultural Economics (1991). We also included data for all years by category and for all twelve categories. The diffusion of dissertations being published in outlet 2, the regional journals, which changed their names shortly after the North Central Journal of Agricultural Economics changed its name to Review of Agricultural Economics can be seen in virtually every category. Thus these journals have become important outlets for dissertations. Three AEA categories ( production economics, agricultural products, and economic development) account for 47 percent of all dissertation topics since 1951. In recent years, the number of dissertations in the areas of natural resources and environmental economics has grown, whereas the number of dissertations on traditional production topics has declined.6 Economic development was the leading dissertation subject category in the 1970s (23 percent of all dissertations were in this topic area), and though its popularity has declined to a 14 percent share today, it is still the largest eld historically. Its popularity could be due to a growing number of doctoral students coming from developing countries with interests in that area. As far back as 1957, Parsons reported that foreign students in agricultural economics strongly desired to conduct dissertation research on problems from their own countries or cultures. Schrimper, summarizing data on Ph.D. programs, found that a growing number of doctoral students were coming from overseas, especially from developing countries.7 For example, from 1975 to 1983, Africa was a large source of students for doctoral programs with almost 24 percent of all Ph.D. recipients from 1981 to 1983 completing undergraduate degrees in African universities. Asia represented 45 percent of all international Ph.D. recipients from 1981 to 1983. Combining ndings from those two studies probably explains a great deal of the interest in economic development. The agricultural inputs category, which covers land, labor, and nance topics, has declined signicantly from the highs of the 1950s and 1960s of more than 20 percent to roughly 8 percent of all dissertations today. These topics are traditionally related to commercial agriculture, and the declining shares are again indicative of the evolution of our profession.

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Of course, all of these conclusions depend on how narrowly or broadly one denes a category. If one were to add categories 2, 3, 4, and 7 and dene them as agricultural economics, this would be the biggest category. We leave the argument over which category is most popular to the readers, but this is the rst analysis of a data code that is collected on each dissertation and is important for understanding why a denition of agricultural economics is not so easy. 7 Gempesaw and Elterich likewise reported that 46 percent of all doctorates in agricultural economics from 1986 to 1987 were awarded to foreign students and that 52 percent of the enrollment in large departments was foreign students.

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Table 2 Number of dissertations and publication rates by AEA code, 19512005 Dissertations AEA code 1. Consumer demand Perioda 1951 1967 1968 1990 1991 2005 All years 1951 1967 1968 1990 1991 2005 All years 1951 1967 1968 1990 1991 2005 All years 1951 1967 1968 1990 1991 2005 All years 1951 1967 1968 1990 1991 2005 All years 1951 1967 1968 1990 1991 2005 All years No. 91 131 139 361 214 704 250 1,168 261 620 277 1,158 312 467 187 966 112 434 339 885 0 121 265 386 Share (%) 6 3 6 5 15 17 10 15 18 15 11 15 21 12 8 12 8 11 14 11 3 11 5 Percentageb published (%) 13 25 26 22 26 28 30 28 18 22 24 21 18 16 18 17 22 24 25 25 28 29 29 If published, share per journal outlet (%) 1 100 79 42 65 100 68 32 65 100 71 23 63 100 78 38 77 100 61 27 52 76 27 42 2 12 28 17 30 51 30 24 50 26 16 41 16 35 38 32 24 40 35 3 3 6 4 2 12 4 4 6 25 14 1 5 2 5 14 7 5 15 6 2 1 1 5

2. Production economics and supply

3. Agricultural products: price analysis, subsector models, marketing, futures markets 4. Agricultural inputs: land, labor, nance

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11 3

3 1

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3 1

3 1 2 23 10

5. Natural resources: energy, conservation, land use, water forestry, sheries 6. Environmentaleconomics: pollution, regulation, non-market valuation

10 4

6 5

3 2

23 16
Continued

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Table 2 Continued Dissertations AEA code 7. Agricultural and food policy: regulation, taxation, welfare 8. Economic development: developing economies, aid, regional, general equilibrium 9. International economics: trade, integration Perioda 1951 1967 1968 1990 1991 2005 All years 1951 1967 1968 1990 1991 2005 All years 1951 1967 1968 1990 1991 2005 All years 1951 1967 1968 1990 1991 2005 All years 1951 1967 1968 1990 1991 2005 All years 1951 1967 1968 1990 1991 2005 All years All years No. 145 334 165 644 169 839 381 1,389 29 208 218 455 96 95 134 325 18 43 80 141 15 61 13 89 7,967 Share (%) 10 8 7 8 12 21 16 17 2 5 9 6 7 2 5 4 1 1 3 2 1 2 1 1 100 Percentageb published (%) 19 25 27 24 18 13 18 15 3 18 19 17 20 19 31 24 22 19 14 16 33 28 15 27 21 If published, share per journal outlet (%) 1 100 71 42 68 100 65 28 58 100 81 24 52 100 83 33 61 100 75 36 61 100 76 50 79 62 2 23 44 25 28 31 25 16 51 34 11 40 24 25 55 35 24 50 21 27 3 1 9 3 5 37 15 3 10 6 6 2 3 4 5 3 2 1 4 1 1 3 1 5

12 6

2 1

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10. Industrial organization and market structure

24 13

11. General: Teaching, extension, methodology, professional development 12. Research methods: statistics, econometrics, mathematical programming Total all codes
a b

9 4

Time periods correspond to important journal/association name changes as discussed in the text. Publication rate refers only to a single dissertation-spawned article in one of the ve journal outlets and does not reect all articles from a dissertation.

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In 1961, Clodius and Mueller argued that the importance of research on industrial organization in agriculture would lead to increased research in that eld in the future. It is interesting that the decade in which they made this claim was followed by two decades of declining dissertations in this category, with a rebound occurring only more recently. But although the number of dissertations remained low, the number of published research articles from those dissertations increased. However, the recent centennial volume of the AJAE in April of 2010 did not use industrial organization as a subject category for a review of the literature it had published.
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Conclusion
Among these ndings, a few key elements stand out. First, there has been a marked downturn in the number of Ph.D. graduates in the broadly dened eld of agricultural economics since 1997. Numbers of graduates in recent years are similar to those of the early 1960s with approximately 125 doctorates awarded per year compared with 175 to 200 or so per year from 1968 to 2000. Second, although the number of Ph.D.s in economics awarded each year has rebounded recently with an inux of international graduates, the number of Ph.D.s in agricultural economics has continued to decline. Third, despite the decline in the number of dissertations in agricultural economics, the frequency of students publishing a dissertation-spawned article in at least one of the agricultural economics journal outlets has risen slightly. However, publishing a dissertation-based article in the AJAE is either getting harder or becoming less popular because of the increased opportunity to publish in other outlets. The journals being managed by the regional agricultural economics associations have become important outlets for doctoral research. These conclusions have implications for the agricultural economics profession. Students areas of research have increasingly moved away from traditional farm economics problems to more general and applied agricultural economics topics such as natural resources and environmental economics, and this has resulted in dissertations that do not necessarily have an agricultural focus. If we consider funding priorities, it is apparent that other topics such as biofuels, carbon sequestration, food safety, climate change, and other policy issues will become research foci in our profession, and it is no surprise that name changes in our associations and journals reect these new topics.

Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge the help of Louise Letnes, Paola Mancia, Hilda Pena, Deborah Sanchez, Lori Thielen, and Troy Walker in the collection of data. A number of individuals have helped us with comments and suggestions as we have pursued this research. We would especially like to thank Julian Alston, Richard Just, Richard Sexton, Wendy Stock, and Tom Vukina for useful comments and suggestions.

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Funding
We acknowledge the Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station (Manuscript no. 10290-j) as the source of funding.

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