Education, Information, and Efficiency

This represents two chapters of a proposed book co-authored by Bob Evenson and myself. The subject is relationships between agricultural productivity, research and information. The first chapter of this part is concerned with the "theory" of the value of information. Among other things, the Bayesian learning model is used as a vehicle for describing optimal learning from experience. The second chapter presents results for a number of empirical studies concerned with relationships between education and allocative efficiency. Section I is reprinted from my J.P.E. paper "Education in Production". Section II is the "Scale Economy" paper of mine which has existed in various unpublished versions for two years now. The final section summarizes recent discussions by Wallace Huffman (Chicago), Nabil Khaloi (SMU) and Charles Fane (Harvard).