The Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act: Has Information Pooling Led to Anticompetitive Behaviour in the US Beef Industry?

Cointegration analysis has been used to assist the testing for price delineation in antitrust and merger cases as a way of deepening econometric evidence. This paper examines the impact of the Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act (1999) instigated in 2001. By addressing the industry as a cointegrated system containing retail, wholesale and farm prices, short run and long run relationships were examined. Cointegration analysis between farm, wholesale and retail sectors suggests that the wholesale sector plays an important role within the system. The econometric estimations find that long run wholesale pricing is weakly exogenous whilst farm and retail prices follow the same trend. This finding suggests that it may be as a result of market inefficiency and calls for further analysis of the role that the wholesale sector plays within the industry.