American Journal of Agricultural Economics最新文献

Informational barriers are often considered to be a major constraint to the adoption of improved farming practices, inputs, and technologies by smallholder farmers. In the Indian context, it is widely believed that farmers misapply chemical fertilizers because they lack scientific information on soil conditions and corresponding fertilizer recommendations, thus resulting in imbalanced and potentially detrimental fertilizer application. Policymakers are frequently interested in providing farmers with various streams of information to overcome these informational barriers to optimize farming activities. However, such informational interventions frequently fail either because generic recommendations may be ill-suited for decision makers in highly heterogeneous agricultural environments or because farmers' beliefs may be so entrenched as to make them unresponsive to new information. We implemented a field experiment in Bihar, India to test whether plot-specific fertilizer recommendations affect farmers' fertilizer use. We find little evidence for sizable impacts on fertilizer use in general, though impacts are more apparent for low cost or costless recommendations such as increasing the use of highly subsidized fertilizers or shifting the timing of application. Despite modest evidence of such effects, even those fall short of their potential magnitude. We show that treated farmers who are less confident in their subjective beliefs about optimal fertilizer application rates (i.e., with more disperse priors) are more responsive to the recommendations and have a higher ex ante willingness to pay for soil testing. These results suggest that heterogeneity in beliefs may constrain the overall effectiveness of information provision, even when the information is tailored to individual farms.

Consumers tend to choose the type of store, or grocery channel, on the basis of “destination categories,” or categories that tend to be important attractors relative to others. Whether or not a category is truly important to generating incremental market share, however, is a difficult empirical question, because there has been little exogenous variation that permits a clear test of whether categories tend to attract traffic. In this study, we leverage a change in beer distribution laws in the state of Colorado that permitted full-strength beer to be sold for the first time in traditional supermarkets. We use a difference-in-difference estimation strategy to test whether the introduction of a new category of products represented an incremental gain in channel attraction using both consumer panel and retail scanner data. Our results show that the introduction of beer into grocery stores in Colorado led to an increase in total weekly sales (1.2%) and a relative increase in expenditures for some categories, notably those that are likely to be complementary to beer purchases. Additional results using the consumer panel indicate an increase in the frequency of grocery store visits by beer-purchasing households as well as an increase in monthly grocery store expenditures (8.0%) among beer-purchasing households.

This article analyzes the impact of a recent merger between the third and the seventh largest broiler producers in the United States on the equilibrium of the downstream broiler market. Reflective of the broiler industry market structure, in the theoretical part of the article we adopt the model of a Cournot oligopoly with a competitive fringe and then apply merger simulation to predict the welfare effects. We fit our theoretical framework to the pre-merger data under the assumption of different numbers of oligopoly firms. The results suggest that the merger between Sanderson Farms and Wayne Farms will significantly increase the market price of chicken meat and decrease consumer surplus, and that the magnitude of these impacts hinges on the size of the oligopoly. The net welfare effect could be positive or negative, but it is not statistically significant at the 5% level.

This paper establishes a statistically and economically significant relationship between national responses to climate change and genetic distance, which is a proxy for countries' dissimilarities in cultures, ancestry, and historical legacies associated with long-term exposure to divergent historical trajectories. It finds that countries that are genetically distant to the world-leading nation-state of climate change mitigation tend to experience barriers to the cross-border diffusion of climate change policies and hence exhibit worse responses to climate change. A potential explanation is that climate change polices are more likely to spread between closely related countries with more similar preferences for the provision of the public goods of environmental and climate protection. The findings imply that strengthening climate change mitigation requires overcoming obstacles to international policy diffusion.