American Journal of Agricultural Economics最新文献

Economic sanctions are more popular than ever. But do they affect agricultural trade? Combining two new datasets and capitalizing on the latest developments in the empirical structural gravity literature, we investigate the effects of sanctions on international trade of agricultural products. We find that trade sanctions impede agricultural trade, whereas other sanctions do not show any significant impact. Complete trade sanctions have led to about a 67% decrease in the agricultural trade between the sanctioned and sanctioning countries, or a corresponding tariff equivalent of 25%, and we also obtain significant estimates for partial sanctions. At the industry level, we find substantial heterogeneity depending on the sanctioning and sanctioned countries, the type of sanctions used, and the direction of trade flows. The 2014 sanctions on Russia substantially decreased Russia's agricultural trade, mainly due to reduced trade with the EU but also due to reduced trade with other countries. Although no definitive evidence exists that sanctions alter the actions of governments of receiving countries, this paper provides broad evidence that sanctions hamper agrifood trade and hurt producers, consumers, and real output.

We examine intra- and intergenerational food security dynamics in the United States using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) while accounting for measurement error. We apply recently developed methods on the partial identification of transition matrices and show that accounting for measurement error is crucial as even modest errors can dwarf the information contained in the data. Nonetheless, we find that much can be learned under fairly weak assumptions; the strongest and most informative assumption being that measurement errors are serially uncorrelated. In particular, although the evidence—both intragenerational and intergenerational—is consistent with significant mobility, we also find food security status to be persistent for at least some households in the tails of the distribution. We further document some heterogeneities in dynamics across households differentiated by race and education. Finally, the impact of measurement error in the context of underlying dynamics is widely applicable to other areas of applied microeconomics generally as well as to food security dynamics in less developed countries specifically.

In many markets, consumers believe things about products that are not true. We study how incorrect beliefs about product quality can persist even after a consumer has used a product many times. We explore the example of fertilizer in East Africa. Farmers believe much local fertilizer is counterfeit or adulterated; however, multiple studies have established that nearly all fertilizer in the area is good quality. We develop a learning model to explain how these incorrect beliefs persist. We show that when the distributions of outcomes using good and bad quality products overlap, agents can misattribute bad luck or bad management to bad quality. Our learning model and its simulations show that the presence of misattribution inhibits learning about quality and that goods like fertilizer with unobservable quality that are inputs into production processes characterized by stochasticity should be thought of as credence goods, not experience goods. Our results suggest that policy makers should pursue quality assurance programs for products that are vulnerable to misattribution.