Welcome to our first full PAER issue of 2021! We look forward to aggregating the great work from the Ag Econ Department this year and helping to bring it to the PAER readership. A key mission of PAER is to represent the breadth of research in our Department and make it accessible to our readership. We hope that a reader surveying our list of articles comes away with a sense of how robust the department’s research profile is – spanning discussion of Indiana’s farmland prices to major international policy debates-.

The editors, in pursuit of the PAER mission, opted to make the April issue themed “Graduate Student Research.” The Purdue Ag Econ graduate students are a key element in research productivity and intellectual drive. We are proud to be training and collaborating with these beginning researchers that will set the standard for discovery in their disciplines for the next generation. Moreover, calling on this group for PAER submissions provides a great lens for readers around the Indiana and the Midwest to view a snapshot of the graduate students-led intellectual life of our Department.