This research activity is supported under the "Research Opportunities for Women--Planning Grant Program". The purpose of this program is to provide an opportunity for women, who have never been the recipient of a federal award, to undertake preliminary work to determine the feasibility of a line of research. This award will allow the investigator to begin to develop a theoretical model of producer decision-making under collective contracts recently introduced as a reform in Soviet agriculture. The new system alters incentives for the use of resources in ways that are amenable to analysis with principal/agent theory that has grown out of inquiry into the nature of share cropping and other forms of land tenure and agricultural contracting. This line of research focusing on agricultural reform in the Soviet Union is both important and timely. Glasnost may have profound long-term effects on U.S./Soviet relations. Each stage of the Soviet attempt at restructuring gives us an observation of a centrally planned economy in transition to a form as yet unknown. Both the transition of the soviet system and its final from is of great practical and scientific interest, since the soviet economy is large and becoming more integrated into world capital and natural resource markets. This is particularly true in agriculture where reform will affect our theoretical understanding of agricultural growth and development, and where reform may also have a major impact on U.S. agricultural prices and exports.
