Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics-Revue Canadienne D Agroeconomie最新文献

Portion cap rules have been proposed to regulate the consumption of foods and ingredients deemed unhealthy. Challenging common intuition, previous theoretical work posits that, when the seller leverages bundling to price-discriminate, buyers are not necessarily affected and some may even benefit from a quantity restriction. I conduct an experiment designed to test this claim. In the laboratory, human subjects take the role of sellers and offer two products to automated buyers with private preferences. I manipulate the policy environment across treatments. The data largely corroborate the anticipated impacts on consumer surplus, speaking to their robustne ss. In particular, consumers with a low appreciation for the regulated good and a high valuation for the unrestricted item benefit from the cap rule.

This study assesses agricultural economics literature on farmland prices and key determinants of these prices. The first section of the paper uses a basic capitalization model to organize a review of the literature and data. We then provide a focused assessment of five streams of literature examining farmland prices: (1) boom-bust; (2) the capitalization effect of government agricultural subsidies on farmland prices; (3) agricultural zoning; (4) climate change; and (5) prohibitions against non-local buyers of farmland. Our review highlights challenges to ongoing efforts to model changing farmland prices, the modern emphasis on econometric identification, important variation in the magnitude of estimated relationships across the literature, and the opportunity to expand research in Canada.

Futures prices are discontinuous, with each future price series ending at maturity. Differencing before splicing can create a continuous future return series, but still leaves price levels with discrete jumps. When comparing cash and futures prices, there is a need to either make the futures more like the cash price by adding back the changes at rollover or removing the nonstationarity and seasonality from cash prices. In the specific situation of only testing market efficiency of futures prices, we propose using panel unit root tests. Our empirical examples using weekly prices show the null hypothesis of a unit root is not rejected in most cases regardless of the test used.

Following Carter and Mérel (2016), we explore the export benefits of reforming supply management (SM) in Canada's dairy sector. A trade model with ten regions and five dairy product categories is developed and used to examine the potential benefits of opening international markets to Canadian dairy products. In addition to a baseline, three scenarios are compared—one with SM in place but with Canada able to export freely. Two other scenarios assume SM is eliminated and there is complete free trade, but with high- and low-cost structures. Findings indicate that, in the high-cost scenario, domestic consumers gain from lower prices as the domestic supply and exports fall compared to the status quo, but producers are less well off. However, under a low domestic cost structure, Canada becomes a major exporter of milk, with both producers and consumers gaining from free trade. This scenario assumes that domestic producers take advantage of economies of scale, enabling them to compete in international markets. Appropriate policies will be required to reform the quota regime, while minimizing the harm done to dairy farmers.

This paper synthesizes Canada's environmental valuation literature over the last six decades. Focusing on primary valuation benefit estimates, we link multiple research outputs from the same data collection effort to obtain an accurate measure of unique studies. We identify a total of 269 unique valuation studies conducted in Canada between 1964 and 2019. The number of valuation studies conducted per year has not increased since 1975 and the median data collection year is 1996. Stated preference (SP) methods are the most popular valuation approaches being used in more than 50% of studies and this share has increased to over 80% within the last decade. We discuss numerous gaps in our knowledge for certain environmental resources and regions, in particular Canada's three Northern territories. The paper provides information on the state of environmental valuation research in Canada and identifies future research needs.

Meat processing plants use inputs in fixed proportions, but these proportions vary with plant size. Shocks to the supply of labor and livestock induce allocative inefficiency, output reductions, and higher unit costs of production. Both labor conflicts and the pandemic caused long labor shortages resulting in unused capacity and large livestock queues. Industry concentration and vertical integration can mitigate some of these problems by internalizing queuing costs and by reallocating workers across plants. Daily shocks make plants operate with either too many workers or too many live animals. Larger plants choose to be labor-constrained more frequently, creating a trade-off between wages and safety for workers.

We develop an analytical framework to examine an agency's optimal grassland easement acquisition while accounting for landowners’ optimal decisions under uncertainty in both conversion and conservation returns. We derive the value of “wait and see” (i.e., neither convert nor ease grassland) for landowners and find that grassland-to-cropland conversion probability and easement value vary in opposing directions when “wait and see” is preferred, indicating that a larger conversion probability does not necessarily imply a higher easement value. Our analysis shows that when conservation funds can be flexibly allocated across periods then the agency's optimal acquisition can be readily achieved by sorting land tracts according to their owners’ optimal choices. When funds cannot be flexibly allocated across periods, we examine both a rational agency's and a myopic agency's decision problems. An acquisition index is developed to facilitate optimal easement acquisition.

Agriculture is an important source of food, employment, and tax revenue to society. However, agricultural expansion is an important driver of global natural ecosystem degradation, including wetlands. Economic theory shows that wetland loss is caused by a mismatch between the private wetland conservation costs borne by landowners and the public benefits generated. We develop a spatially explicit wetland management model to estimate the private economic benefit of wetland drainage in an agricultural landscape in Alberta, Canada. We estimate a full wetland supply curve and show that the private economic benefits of wetland drainage are highly heterogeneous within a watershed. We then combine these private costs of wetland conservation with non-monetary measures of public ecosystem benefits to assess four wetland conservation policy targeting scenarios. We find a positive correlation between the opportunity cost of wetland conservation on private landowners and the amount of environmental benefits wetlands offer, suggesting that conserving the wetlands that impose the lowest opportunity cost may not be optimal targets for wetland conservation policy. We contribute to wetland conservation economics by demonstrating that targeted wetland conservation policies can be more effective than a uniform conservation policy that assumes wetlands within agricultural landscapes have the same costs and benefits.

Wheat markets stand out among other major crop commodity markets because pricing at the first point of exchange—typically a grain handling facility—is differentiated on specific quality characteristics. Moreover, the premiums and discounts that elevators offer to obtain grain of specific quality can be significant. The relative importance of quality premiums and discounts to farm-level production and marketing decisions demonstrate a need to quantitatively measure and explain factors that affect elevators' wheat-quality pricing decisions. This study develops an informed expectation model of elevators' quality-based pricing strategies and empirically estimates the model from a lengthy dataset of weekly price observations. I find empirical evidence that elevators use linear pricing schedules, but more aggressively discount wheat with protein levels lower than a baseline than reward higher-protein wheat. The results also indicate that weather characteristics, futures contract price indicators, and USDA Crop Progress reports are contributors to predicting the new crop protein premiums and discounts, and that out-of-sample accuracy for predicting how grain elevators will value wheat protein ranges between 70% and 80%.

We explore the information content of dockside prices and fishing costs in the estimation of stock abundance. Our approach is two-pronged: we first examine whether the implied biomass, that is, the biomass that is consistent with a simple microeconomic model calibrated with observed prices and costs, offers an approximation of actual stock assessments—both agree over the first 20 years of observation, but diverge over the last five. In a second approach, we use annual data in Vector Autoregressive (VAR), Bayesian VAR (B-VAR), and Vector Error Correction (VEC) frameworks and add monthly data in a mixed-frequency data analysis including Mixed-Frequency Bayesian VAR (MF-BVAR) and Mixed-Data Sampling (MIDAS) frameworks for log-differenced time series. Parameter uncertainties are addressed through Bayesian regression and forecasting methods. We find a statistically significant correlation between biometric estimates and changes in a price-based indicator that is robust to the inclusion of confounding factors. We conclude that the combination of price data and per-trip landings, when interpreted with care, can serve as a complementary, but comparatively affordable and timely, source of information for stock assessments.