Determining the impacts on consumers of governmental policies that affect the demand for food products requires a theoretically consistent micro-level demand model. We estimate a system of demands for weekly city-level dairy product purchases by nonlinear three-stage least squares to account for...

This paper integrates several areas of the literature by more fully developing the linkage between demand estimates and the welfare effects of food labels and bans for three common survey/experimental approaches used to elicit consumer preferences. We present empirical applications related to...

Do direct payments alter operators' acreage decisions? The authors use an event study with individual-level data in a panel-data setting to examine how an exogenous change in direct payments affects individual farmers' production decisions. They track changes in acreage across time and examine...

Recent work with Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) in development economics has contributed to economists' use of the experimental mindset to inform policy choices. Development scholars, however, question the authority of RCT evidence, and worry that the RCT trend will turn their profession...

Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) were developed to act as tracking mechanisms that ensure compliance with the U.S. biofuel use mandates legislated in 2005 and increased and adjusted to include sub-mandates in 2007. Reviewing the rules for RIN production and use, we conclude that RIN...

We estimate the effect of legalization on the wages and benefits of foreign-born agricultural workers. Using data from the National Agricultural Workers Survey, we employ propensity score matching techniques to compare legal permanent residents in the United States with an appropriate control...

Impact evaluation based on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) offers a powerful tool that has fundamentally reshaped development economics by offering novel solutions to long-standing problems of weak causal identification. Nonetheless, RCTs suffer important and underappreciated pitfalls, some...

This paper uses an unprecedentedly rich data set to estimate the cost of agricultural cargo preference (ACP) restrictions on United States food aid programs, and to document some of the programs' competitiveness and national security impacts. ACP cost U.S. taxpayers $140 million in 2006, 46%...

In this paper we focus on inefficient product quality arising from a free-riding problem in agricultural cooperatives. Individual incentives are not aligned with group gains in cooperatives because individual members bear the costs of offering higher qualities, whereas the benefits from these...

Greater attention has been given to trade costs in both the empirical trade literature and in theoretical models of international trade in recent years, with interest increasingly being directed towards the role of nonpolicy barriers such as transport costs. However, if distance is a proxy for...