Wallace Huffman has attained a reputation for outstanding scholarship in his research and publications, successfully training graduate students through innovative classroom teaching and directing graduate student research, and high quality service to the profession. His academic career started from modest aspirations. He grew up working the family farm in southeast Iowa, and enrolled after high school in a two-year farm operations program at Iowa State University. During his freshman year, considerable intellectual ability and competitiveness in hard courses emerged quickly. His outstanding performance extended educational plans to a BS degree and brought the reward of a three-year scholarship containing requirements of considerable coursework in mathematics and physics while maintaining high scholarship. Then graduate school prospects and interests postponed farming and other activities. In 1966, he enrolled at the University of Chicago and in 1972 received a Ph.D. degree in economics. This started a long-term and productive association with T.W. Schultz, D. Gale Johnson, Robert Evenson, and Zvi Griliches.

He has made major contributions to the literature by taking on socially important problems and performing careful but imaginative econometric analysis. With modern economic growth, new technologies sometimes create significant economic disequilibria. Huffman showed that adoption/change is not just a response to relative prices or profitability--it takes time, varies across economic regions and producers, and the speed of adjustment by producers is positively related to their education, agricultural extension contacts, and enterprise size. Furthermore, farmers' schooling and extension were shown to be substitutes in this adoption process. When imperfect information exists about the performance of technologies, acquiring, processing, applying information, and disseminating information constitute an important part of the dynamics of adoption/change and of agricultural supply.

Adjustment within and across labor markets has been a long-standing issue in North America. He pioneered the application of agricultural household models to off-farm labor supply decisions of farm household members. For nonmetropolitan wage workers, his research has shown that by the late 1970s, real wage rates for residents in the U.S. South, adjusted for human capital investments and local cost of living, amenities, and labor market conditions, were for the first time in about 100 years comparable to residents of other regions. Most enlightening for public policy, however, are insights on illegal Mexican immigration. In a 1986 AJAE article which received an AAEA award, he and Torok combined international trade in labor intensive fresh tomatoes and agricultural labor (illegal Mexican workers) into an econometric model. The model linked the effects of prices, wage rates, and incomes in the two countries with trade and immigration policy to show a complex interrelationship between commodity trade and illegal immigration. When published, their work was controversial because they had assumed that farm labor markets from Florida to Sinaloa, Mexico, were linked through a long sequence of local labor markets by migratory workers. Recent post-IRCA analysis of farm labor markets has validated this assumption. He also correctly predicted the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act would not stop illegal Mexican immigration because the technology for manufacturing fraudulent documents was advancing much faster than the political economics of enforcement. Recent research by Huffman and others has shown IRCA was ineffective and had mainly "unintended" effects.

In early economic growth models, technical change was exogenous, and in growth accounting studies, the "residual" accounted for a majority of growth. Huffman and Evenson have advanced greatly our understanding of science-based technical change and agricultural productivity change. They published the first comprehensive story and quantitative history of the U.S. public and private R&D system for agriculture. They emphasized technology invention and pre-technology sciences. They were the first to conceptualize a key role for pre-technology sciences in a successful R&D system and to show that pre-technology research had a high rate of return relative to other forms of public agricultural research. They were the first to construct a historical series on U.S. private R&D for agriculture, show private sector investments were large relative to public expenditures after 1950, examine econometrically the effects of private R&D on the rate of return to public agricultural research, and show private R&D for agriculture has large positive social spillovers. Finally, they have made major contributions to U.S. R&D policy for agriculture and the planning and management of agricultural research.

Wallace Huffman has a reputation for high-quality teaching and training of graduate students that helps them apply abstract concepts and methods to applied problems. He also has regularly participated in the activities of the AAEA and provided valuable service to the AJAE and the committees of the Association.