American Journal of Agricultural Economics最新文献

Value upgrading through processing has been a core tenet of value chain interventions focusing on improving smallholder farmer welfare improvements. However, assessing the quality of processed agricultural products may be more difficult than unprocessed products. The resulting information asymmetry between producer and the buyer may lead to perverse outcomes for agrarian households. Using primary panel data collected from over 1500 coffee growing households in eastern Uganda and employing fixed effects approaches, we show that grower-level post-harvest processing has characteristics of a market for lemons and is associated with lower coffee income compared with unprocessed coffee production. Activities aiming at moving growers up the value chain should thus be integrated with relevant characteristics of the value chain, such as quality assurance. We add to the literature by presenting a clear description of the pathway from supply chains with asymmetric information over produce quality to diminished farmer welfare with a novel focus on post-harvest processing.

Although the Clean Water Act's regulation of point source pollution has had a significant effect on water quality, nonpoint sources of pollution, especially animal agriculture, remain a leading unevenly regulated source of water pollution in the United States. This work studies the effectiveness of local manure management regulations on dairy farms in Wisconsin. Wisconsin represents a unique policy experiment in the delegation of nonpoint agricultural pollution policy in a state with economically important small, nonpoint, dairy farms. Using hand collected regulatory data from Wisconsin counties we estimate the effects of changes in local regulations on water quality outcomes. The results demonstrate that a few easily implemented and verifiable regulations such as nutrient management plans have significant short-term effects on water quality, whereas other less observable and difficult to implement regulations have no discernible effects in the short term. The work points to a number of potential policy levers to improve the Management of nonpoint pollution, as well as the challenges of nonpoint source regulatory policies on slow-moving hydrologic processes.

This paper analyzes the extent to which two factors—social networks and the severity of the scarcity of a common property resource—affect norm-complying behavior that favors cooperation. It assumes that those who comply with the social norm exercise social pressure on defectors. We develop an analytical framework that allows us to determine the minimum (maximum) share of norm-complying agents at which social networks start (stop) having an influence on cooperation. Knowing these shares allows policymakers to identify the conditions under which legal and/or informal enforcement policies for cooperation are effective and how different types of social networks affect the design of these policies. We find that stable steady states exist in which compliers and defectors coexist (partial cooperation), but the stability of such states requires that the costs of coordination among compliers to exercise social pressure are high. Full cooperation is another possible steady state but is unlikely to prevail if the agents do not perceive the scarcity of the common property resource as severe. A numerical study, empirically calibrated for an aquifer in Spain, shows that subsidizing the compliers' costs of exerting social pressure may impede the attainment of a steady state based on partial cooperation. Although social networks can promote cooperation, their influence is limited. The minimum share of compliers for attaining cooperation can be reduced by informal enforcement policies by not more than 26%. We show that combinations of different types of informal enforcement policies should be applied cautiously because they may cancel each other out.