Country of origin labeling (COOL) is a common practice. It occurs routinely for many products in many places, but the US implementation of mandatory COOL for meat, whose purpose is to identify the origin of the livestock used to produce the meat, generated much controversy and a major WTO...

The objective of this document is to provide non-economists the analytical tools to understand the economics of Canada's supply management programs. It begins with an overview of Canada's supply management programs and a discussion about their history. It then provides a review of basic economic...

We analyze the effects of mergers and the introduction of concurrent marketing mechanisms on the seller’s revenue, price trend and efficiency in sequential auctions under complete information with asymmetric bidders. First, we provide conditions for bidders to be strategic when the number of...

Canada’s hog sector has faced two decades of tumultuous growth, yet there are no recent estimates of supply response. A state-space model for hog supply response is developed that accounts for the time series properties of the data while accounting for a multiplicity of unspecified sources for...

We analyze the impact of input tariffs on the export status and export performance of processing firms. From a theoretical model with heterogeneous downstream firms, we show that lower input tariffs may increase the export sales of the high productivity firms at the expense of low productivity...

We analyze the spatial distribution of genetically modified (GM) and organic crops. Because some organic crops will likely be contaminated by GM crops, not all of the non- GM crops can be sold as organic. Therefore, the choice of producing organic crops will depend on the surrounding crops. When...

The Masters Hypothesis is the claim that unprecedented buying pressure in recent years from commodity index investors created massive bubbles in food and energy prices. A number of recent studies investigate the empirical relationship between index investment and price movements in agricultural...

This essay shows the role of economics in the adulteration of food imports.The mechanism of impact in the model is the choice of input quality by exporting firms. One implication of the model is that conomic variables can be used to predict adulteration in food imports. The essay offers an...