the dynamics of individuals fat consumption consumers are increasingly aware of the link between their lifestyle choices and the risk of noncommunicable diseases a dynamic approach incorporating this linkage in food demand is developed where consumers maximize utility over time by choosing fat intake to control their cumulative fat level the resulting dynamic indirect utility function and household data on meat fish and dairy consumption are used to estimate a censored demand system results show that consumers consciously adjust but not instantaneously their cumulative fat level highly educated households have a faster rate of adjustment of cumulative fat when cumulative fat level increases consumers shift to dairy or white meat from red meat products

eco labelling by a for profit certifier countervailing power and its consequences for profit certifier s eco labelling is common in industries where firms have some countervailing power on sharing gains from labelling we show that the certification standard for an environmental quality is lowered when firms have strong power a certifier with too low bargaining power will prefer to sell to the best offer rather than bargain this switch in the selling mechanism also thwarts his incentives in setting the standard this is consequential for evaluating policies the dimensions and even signs of welfare changes induced by taxes and subsidies depend upon the mechanism used and ultimately upon firms countervailing power

calories conflict and correlates redistributive food security in post conflict iraq war torn iraq manifests itself as an ideal laboratory for food policy experimentation due to availability of unique data surrounding intra household calorie consumption and the presence of selected correlates including but not restricted to substantial disruptions to social infrastructure and fundamental public policy intervention among other findings expenditure elasticities are mostly positive and dramatically curvilinear with respect to wealth and lump sum redistribution of the iraqi public distribution system emerges as a feasible policy intervention extensions are discussed

demand for rural tourism the effects of quality and information the development of rural tourism is regarded as a promising diversification strategy especially for lagging and mountainous areas of the european union research concerning the demand and or supply of rural tourism services has been limited within the agricultural economics domain despite the significance attached to rural tourism by various rural development policy measures and initiatives the article examines the expenditure behavior of rural tourists within a framework of demand for composite heterogeneous goods the proposed framework captures the quality of the tourism experience as the commodity s unit value a quantifiable economic variable examines its effects on expenditures and allows for the estimation of elasticity in prices regarding expenditure and quantity empirical analysis is facilitated by a survey recording the expenditure behavior of 465 tourists in two rural and lagging areas of greece the quality of the tourism experience is significantly and positively affected by the income the source from which information about the trip is retrieved internet newspapers as well as general press and special travel press and by the amount of information sought by the consumer prior to the trip in turn the quality of the tourism experience is the major endogenous factor that positively influences expenditures for rural tourism further research is needed before evidence provided in this work can be used to draw policy conclusions and recommendations

organic labelling private label and u s household demand for fluid milk abstractthe u s fluid milk market has been experiencing two trends in the recent decade the fast growth of private label milk and organic milk using the data from nielsen homescan panel we estimate a censored demand system to study the demand relations among types of milk differentiated by brand types and organic status we find that sociodemographic factors still play important roles in household choice of milk types and fluid milk as a whole is an inferior good moreover as income increases households are more likely to shift from buying conventional milk to organic milk and from private label conventional milk to branded conventional milk as indicated by the asymmetric cross price elasticities corresponding implications for milk producers and marketers are discussed

food scandals media attention and habit persistence among desensitised meat consumers abstract consumer reactions to food scandals and their resulting economic implication are well documented however studies have typically neglected the roles that consumption habits and media usage behaviours may play in explaining household s response to food safety incidences in this study we develop a model of heterogeneous media usage intensity information impacts and decay over time to estimate household s behavioural responses to the 2011 german dioxin scandal we are specifically interested in determining the degree of heterogeneity in household s short term adjustments demand patterns versus persisting long term consumption habits of meat products chicken and pork directly affected by the incident the empirical analysis employs detailed household level retail scanner and media usage data collected by the gfk consumer scan panel for a total of 16 023 households over a period of 104 calendar weeks results of dynamic correlated random effect tobit models indicate an important role of unobserved heterogeneity in explaining household responses during the food scandal we find strong empirical evidence supporting our hypothesis that short term marginal adjustments in demand and propensity to buy affected products triggered by the negative impact of household media exposure were over compensated by habit persistence the question of how consumption patterns evolve over time in the presence of food scandals is expected to be of interest for both policy makers and the food industry the potential biases in the projection of economic impacts resulting from simplifying assumptions of household s response patterns to a proliferating numbers of food safety incidences has implications for risk management and public policy

price advertising and the deterioration of product quality arguments in favour of self enforced bans on advertising by professionals often rely on the stylized fact that advertising can communicate information about price but not about quality this being the case it is argued that allowing professionals to advertise runs the risk that firms will compete vigorously over price at the expense of the quality of their product this paper shows that even if price can communicate no information directly about quality it can do so indirectly because price will be a signal of quality because of this allowing advertising is shown to improve consumer welfare

prices and quality effects in cross sectional demand analysis a conceptual clarification of the sources and meaning of cross sectional price variability is used to motivate a theoretical and econometric framework for the estimation of cross sectional demand functions quality effects are distinguished from supply related price variability to identify cross sectional demand for disaggregated food commodities an empirical application using data from the 1977 78 nationwide food consumption survey indicates that parameter differences resulting from a failure to adjust cross sectional prices for quality effects are likely to be small for relatively homogenous disaggregated food commodities in demand analysis with cross sectional household budget data it is usually assumed that prices are constant allen and bowley prais and houthakker george and king given this assumption engel functions are estimated where expenditure or quantity is regressed on income or total expenditures family size and other demographic characteristics the assumption that cross sectional price effects are absent or are captured adequately by spatial and temporal dummy variables has not been evaluated empirically whether cross sectional price effects can be treated in this manner has implications for the specification of cross sectional demand functions as well as the estimation of engel functions there is a considerable literature on estimating price elasticities with cross sectional data most of the applications utilize timeseries cross sectional data annual or quarterly household consumption surveys and

estimation of censored demand equations from large cross section data the article develops an alternative econometric methodology to estimate a system of censored demand equations using a large cross section data from colombian urban households the approach preserves the behavioralinformation expressed by zero expenditures and conforms with the requirements imposed by consumer theory in a way consistent with the random utility hypothesis we motivate the choice of the tobit modelas a statistical representation of consumer behavior and introduce the methodology by specifying the aids model modified according to both a translating and scaling demographic transformation we propose to estimate each demand equation in unrestricted form using the jackknife technique we then recover the demand parameters imposing the cross equations restrictions by using minimum distance estimation the empirical results of the censored demand system for specific households of policy relevance are reported copyright 2000 oxford university press

household composition and food expenditures a cross country comparison abstract in the analysis of food expenditures use of household member counts as an explanatory variable assumes each member has the same marginal food expenditure impact in our analysis of latin american food expenditures we reject this assumption via the estimation of endogenously determined adult equivalence scales that vary by household member gender and age a series of hypothesis tests indicate significant differences not only in the male versus female equivalence scales but also across country with the use of such equivalence scales in the definition of per capita expenditures we find significant differences in the distributions implying substantially different poverty rankings

prices and qualities in markets with costly information this paper extends the seminal work of akerlof and salop and stiglitz in two directions i the sellers can select both the selling prices and quality levels of their good and ii the buyers can acquire price quality information about individual sellers at a cost we observe multiple price quality combinations in equilibrium which depend upon the distribution of information costs of consumers and upon whether quality or price or both are costly observable welfare comparisons of equilibrium are considered we show that welfare will be greater when price advertising is permitted

certification under oligopolistic competition in a symmetric duopolistic market where each firm s choice regarding certain quality attributes such as the environmental friendliness of its product is its own private information the extent of horizontal differentiation between firms plays a crucial role in a certifier s optimal certification policy under a non profit certifier it is always the case that both firms produce the highest quality and opt for certification this is also the case under a for profit certifier but only when the degree of horizontal differentiation is sufficiently high when horizontal differentiation is low the for profit certifier by charging a very high certification fee creates maximum vertical differentiation between firms as a result only one firm produces the highest quality and opts for certification whereas the other firm produces the lowest quality and does not opt for certification this asymmetry under a for profit certifier makes the market inefficient which provides one possible explanation for the existence of mostly non profit certifiers in such markets

oligopolistic competition in price and quality abstract we consider an oligopolistic market where firms compete in price and quality and where consumers have heterogeneous information some consumers know both the prices and quality of the products offered some know only the prices and some know neither we show that if there are sufficiently many uninformed consumers then there exists a unique equilibrium where price is a perfect indicator of quality this equilibrium is characterized by dispersion and pareto inefficiency of the price quality offers where better price quality combinations are associated with lower prices

credence attributes voluntary organizations and social pressure abstract credence attributes of products are unobservable through search or experience some consumers are willing to pay a premium for their provision and in addition citizens can apply social pressure on firms to supply credence attributes firms have formed voluntary organizations to assure the provision of credence attributes and the credible provision provides product differentiation this paper provides a theory of the voluntary provision of credence attributes in the presence of demand pull from consumers and social pressure from ngos where an organization chooses a credence standard and firms compete given the standard the credence standard is lower the larger the organization and social pressure results in a higher standard

regional monetary policy an australian perspective fraser p macdonald g a and mullineux a w regional monetary policy an australian perspective regional studies a structural vector autoregressive svar model for australia is utilized to identify the domestic impacts of common monetary policy shocks on national and state business cycles and to consider the role of state diversification disparities for observed differences in responses to monetary policy innovations western australia and queensland differ to other states in their response to common shocks and evidence suggests this may be due to differences in their economic geographies overall the australian monetary union has become increasingly reliant on fiscal transfers particularly from western australia in the past two decades this emphasizes the importance of a political union underpinning a successful monetary union

a latent variable model of consumer taste determination and taste change for complex carbohydrates despite evidence that aggregate consumption of complex carbohydrates has risen over the last decade food consumption surveys suggest that fewer households are consuming less bread pasta rice potatoes and corn this paper estimates systems of complex carbohydrae demand using cross sectional data from 1977 78 and 1987 88 in order to explain this paradox changes in demand that are not explained by changes in prices or income are explained by variations in taste because tastes cannot be directly observed the paper uses a multiple indicator and multiple cause mimic model to construct a suitable proxy variable in the mimic approach the indicators are residuals from a household demand function that includes prices and incomes as explanatory variables while household and demograhic proxies are cause variables the objectives in applying the mimic model are to determine the effect of consumer tastes on complex carbohydrate demand and comparing cross sectional survey data from two different periods

the testing and estimation of complete demand systems on household budget surveys a recent demand system aids is extended to include family size explicitly and then estimated on indian budget data the estimation using non linear fiml is performed first on pure time series and then on pooled cross section data within and across equation restrictions are imposed and tested the principal results include u a significant price and family size effects on the budget share of an item b sensitivity of test results on homogeneity and symmetry to i rural urban data ii time series cross section and iii inclusion omission of family size c considerable difference between pure time series and pooled cross section estimates and d difference between the expenditure responses of the rural and urban consumer

town size and the consumer behaviour of spanish households a panel data approach the aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of town size on the spanish demand for food the methodological approach followed in the study is to use panel data built from the spanish quarterly national expenditure survey to estimate a demand system the use of this type of data allows control for unobserved time invariant heterogeneity as well as to take into account the time and the cross section dimension of data four locations are distinguished 1 less than 10000 inhabitants 2 between 10000 and 100000 inhabitants 3 between 100000 and 500000 inhabitants and 4 more than 500000 inhabitants eight broad food categories are considered 1 cereals and potatoes 2 meat 3 fish 4 dairy products 5 fats and oils 6 fruits 7 vegetables and 8 other food income and price elasticities are calculated for each location in general terms two general conclusions can be drawn first results indicate that only slight changes in tastes have taken place during the analysed period second

modelling the dynamics of regional employment population ratios and their commonality this paper looks at movements over time in regional employment population ratios an important and much neglected determinant of regional performance we utilise data on gross flows into and out of employment and focus on information contained in the transition rates the paper applies an unobserved components econometric model to a panel of australian data to identify and explain the evolution of regional employment population ratios over time the approach identifies a common i e nationwide factor while allowing for region specific effects including region specific impacts of the common factor the contribution of the common factor to changes in regional employment population ratios ranges between 38 and 80 conversely regional elements explain between 20 and 62 of changes the findings highlight the importance of adopting explicit regional employment policies as a complement to national policy

on bias correction in the multivariate sample selection model heien and wessells two step estimator for the multivariate sample selection model has been used extensively during the past 15 years a modified version of it with slightly different selectivity regressors has also appeared in the empirical literature both estimators are unfounded and generally do not correct for the sample selectivity bias as intended but have continued to gain popularity in empirical applications the properties of the modified heien wessells procedure are investigated in both the bivariate and multivariate contexts and the conditions under which this estimator fails to correct for sample selectivity are examined the theoretical properties are demonstrated with a simulated random sample

co2 and energy efficiency of different heating technologies in the dutch glasshouse industry this paper uses data envelopment analysis tocompute input based technical efficiencymeasures and co2 and energy technicalefficiency of specialised vegetable firms inthe netherlands over the period 1991 1995 input based scale efficiency is also calculatedfor each firm these efficiency measures aregenerated for firms with different heatingtechnologies the empirical results indicatethat firms use energy quite efficiently and areless efficient in terms of co2 emissions differences in co2 energy efficiencyacross different technologies are not statistically significant in particular firms using traditional heating technologiesare less efficient in terms of co2 scaleadjustments can provide an importantcontribution to further efficiencyimprovements

variation in retail costs for fresh vegetables and salty snacks across communities in the united states abstract households living in different communities pay different amounts of money for food food costs depend on whether a household lives in an urban community or in a locality with a high incidence of poverty among other factors this study focuses on spatial variation across the united states in the retail costs for fresh vegetables and salty snacks findings reveal that the major economic and demographic characteristics of a household s community affect its costs for these two types of foods differently however households are likely to pay more money for salty snacks in communities where fresh vegetables also cost more

disaggregated household meat demand with censored data previous research on meat demand has generally used highly aggregated data across time products and consumers however meat products across species are likely stronger substitutes than some products from the same species further demand for specific meat products would be expected to respond differently to market information about food safety or other events this study uses monthly consumer panel data collected between 1992 and 2000 to estimate a disaggregated meat product demand system the use of the expectations maximization algorithm is introduced to estimate a demand system that adjusts for the econometric problem of censored data resulting from purchased shares of some products by individuals often being equal to zero results indicate that certain individual meat products have noticeably different own price elasticities than existing aggregate meat product estimates of their respective species some individual meat products have stronger substitutes across species than within species e g be

rating the raters are reputation concerns powerful enough to discipline rating agencies abstract credit rating agencies cras are accused of bearing a strong responsibility for contributing to the subprime crisis by having been deliberately too lax in the ratings of some structured products in response to this accusation cras argue that such an attitude would be too dangerous for them since their reputation is at stake the objective of this article is to examine the validity of this argument within a formal model are reputation concerns sufficient to discipline rating agencies we show that the reputation argument only works when a sufficiency large fraction of the cra income comes from other sources than rating complex products by contrast when rating complex products becomes a major source of income for the cra we show that it is always too lax with a positive probability and inflates ratings with probability one when its reputation is good enough we provide some empirical support for this prediction by showing that ceteris paribus the proportion of subprime residential mortgage backed securities rmbs that were rated aaa by the three main cras indeed increased over the last eight years we analyze the policy implications of our findings and advocate for a new business model of cras that we call the platform pays model

five a day a price to pay an evaluation of the uk program impact accounting for market forces we provide an ex post assessment of the uk 5 a day information campaign where the positive effects of information are disentangled from potentially conflicting price dynamics using 4 years of data from the expenditure and food survey between 2002 and 2006 we estimate that the 5 a day program has lifted fruit and vegetable consumption by 0 3 portions on average we also provide quantitative evidence of a differentiated impact by income group ranging from 0 2 to 0 7 portions all impacts are larger than those observed by simply comparing pre policy and post policy intakes

food demand in mexico an application of the amemiya tobin approach to the estimation of a censored food system the modeling of micro level food demand patterns requires not only allowing for household heterogeneity but also addressing the problem of censoring in this article we present a variation of the amemiya tobin framework for estimating a censored demand system that allows for household heterogeneity the unique aspect of our approach is the use of a procedure that ensures the adding up of both latent and observed expenditure shares and also imposes expenditure share nonnegativity this system is applied to an analysis of food demand based on a random sample of urban mexican households

natural rate estimates for the australian states an svar approach groenewold n and hagger a j 2003 natural rate estimates for the australian states an svar approach reg studies 37 251 263 it has long been recognized that economic policy based on national economic indicators may be inappropriate when evaluated from the point of view of individual regions making up the national economy one indicator which has recently been widely used as a basis for the formulation of macroeconomic policy is the natural rate of unemployment there have been various estimates of the natural rate for australia as a whole in the recent past and these have been used for the assessment of macroeconomic policy there are however no estimates of natural rates for the australian states and so no basis for the evaluation of macroeconomic policy from the perspective of the states this paper fills this gap in the literature and reports estimates of a series for the natural rate for each of the australian states derived from a structural vector auto regressive svar model we compare

estimation of demand functions using cross sectional household data the problem revisited a procedure that corrects for selectivity bias is proposed to estimate demand functions using cross sectional data under the assumption that prices vary across households this procedure which extends the work by cox and wohlgenant includes a two equation system of expenditure and unit value functions this model is applied to household expenditures for beef steaks and roasts

variety prices and food status in low income households the basic premise of this paper is that a household receives utility directly from the status of a food composite good which is created by combining a household s skill and creativity in preparing foods other inputs and the kinds and amounts of foods available we proceed to investigate the factors influencing the demand for and prodcution of this composite good the demand for food status in influenced most by the following characteristics race education houshold size homeownership region of household residence and income direct price effects were minor estimates of a food status production function imply that the production of food status is not much a matter of the quantities of foods consumed but rather the types of food purchased variety and the creativity of the homemaker

strategic certification and provision of quality we study the effect of the presence of a certification intermediary in an environment where information asymmetries are particularly severe the intermediary improves the information that buyers have about quality this in turn increases the incentives that the seller has to provide high quality goods efficiency is increased by the presence of the intermediary but quality is underprovided in equilibrium relative to full information the intermediary can implement the optimal policy in many ways the amount of information revealed ranges from full disclosure to partial noisy disclosure

a demand systems analysis of food commodities by u s households segmented by income using the 1987 88 nationwide food consumption survey twelve food commodity groups were analyzed according to household poverty status parameter estimates were used to obtain subsistence expenditures own price elasticities expenditure elasticities and income elasticities own price elasticities were similar between the income groups for most commodities however income elasticities were consistently higher for the lower income group the use of average estimates of price and income elasticities for the population as a whole for the projection of individual commodity demands is not likely to be successful if notable changes are evident in income distribution

habit formation and demand for sugar sweetened beverages using scanner data we estimated demand for nine nonalcoholic beverages under habit formation we found strong evidence for habit formation although demand for sugar sweetened beverages by low income households is less elastic to own price changes compared with high income households there is evidence that high income households consider beverages to be more substitutable than low income households do a half cent per ounce tax on store purchased sugar sweetened beverages will result in a moderate reduction in consumption of sugar sweetened beverages for both income strata because of habit formation long run national tax revenue from a sugar sweetened beverage tax is about 15 to 20 lower than short run revenue

stated and revealed preferences for organic and cloned milk combining choice experiment and scanner data the u s food and drug administration s recent announcement that milk from cloned cows is as safe to drink as that from conventionally bred cows prompted interest among farmers food retailers and regulators in the market impacts of the introduction of milk from clones because milk from cloned animals is not currently labeled in the market we utilized a stated preference experiment to determine consumer preferences for the attribute but also sought to determine whether the survey based choices were consistent with people s revealed preferences given by scanner data our analysis indicates that a pooled model combining stated and revealed preference data exhibits overall better out of sample prediction performance than either data set used alone results from the pooled model indicate that consumers are willing to pay large premiums to avoid milk from cloned cows an amount that is over three times that for organic or rbst free milk the results are used to calculate the value of a mandatory labeling program

an inverse demand analysis with introduction of quality effects an application to spanish consumption of fruit and vegetables this article analyzes consumer preference for fruit and vegetables when by using time series with socioeconomic characteristics of households there can be seemingly unobserved quality effects which are increased by aggregation the changes in spanish demand for fresh and processed fruit and vegetables over the period 1987 2000 are discussed following previous tests and analyses quantities are taken as predetermined and prices as matching the offer conditions thus quality effects based on the nutritional and or health value of the product are estimated from the error terms associated with the functions of the unit values quality variables are introduced as taste shifters in the inverse demand system laitinen theil model the results show the positive effects of quality differences on the normalized price for the group of products through own quality flexibilities and the negative effects between fresh and processed products through cross quality flexibilities

the demand for food quality in rural china many studies of food demand do not use actual prices but unit values obtained by dividing expenditures by the quantity consumed this can bias empirical analyses because unit values are not exogenous market prices they reflect household food quality choices within each food category this article develops a framework for assessing the resulting bias in income and price elasticities of demand and applies the framework to data for rural china empirical results indicate that households in rural china tend to consume higher quality food as income increases with a greater sensitivity to income for basic foods than for luxury foods copyright 2009 oxford university press

measuring the welfare effects of reducing a subsidy on a commodity using micro models an application to kuwait s residential demand for electricity abstract this paper provides a conceptual and empirical approach for evaluating the direct benefits and costs that are associated with reforming the price of a subsidized commodity using a micro model the welfare analysis is based on two alternative scenarios a hypothetical percentage increase in the price of the commodity and a hypothetical percentage decrease in the amount of subsidy the latter is considered to be a simultaneous problem in which the exact price of the commodity that reduces consumption and subsequently the subsidy to the specific target level needs to be determined first as a case study the paper utilizes the most recent household expenditure survey in the state of kuwait to estimate residential electricity demand for different household groups i e low middle and high income and employs a partial equilibrium model to measure the welfare implications that may result from a reduction in the electricity subsidy rates the empirical findings show that a small increase in the price of electricity would reduce annual consumption by 4741 million kwh and annual subsidy by us 734 million the results also show that the loss in consumers welfare is approximately us 145 million while the financial and environmental benefits to the society ranges between us 658 million and us 889 million the magnitude of these welfare gains suggests that electricity price reforms combined with a rebate scheme to compensate households for their welfare loss offsetting any political resistance to reform is a win win situation

quantifying the structure of food demand in china an econometric approach this article examines food demand structure and its dynamics for 11 commodities in urban china the analysis is based on household level expenditure survey data for two cross sectional surveys of chinese households pertaining to food expenditure patterns during 1995 and 2003 pre committed components of commodity demands that are insensitive to economic variables are explored we use the generalized quadratic almost ideal demand system gqaids for its empirical superiority to the generalized almost ideal demand system gaids and estimate the associated parameters via full information maximum likelihood procedure fiml accounting for endogeneity of total expenditures on food for home consumption fah we also use quality adjusted commodity unit values to control for quality differences resulting from commodity aggregation and food choice furthermore we derive gqaids elasticity formulas and estimate income elasticities without restrictions the results partially support the hypothesis that an average chinese household has incorporated elements of western diet fine grains into traditional chinese food diet over time moreover the outcome of a simple test developed here points to possible preference changes for a majority of food staples under study

prices as signals of product quality this paper is concerned with the provision of quality in markets in which consumers have only imperfect information the analysis focuses on a market for a product that can be produced at different quality levels all consumers prefer higher to lower quality but they may differ in their willingness to pay for quality producers can produce any quality they like but higher qualities are more costly to produce the information in this market is imperfect in the sense that the exact quality chosen by a firm is known only to the firm itself some information about the quality of a firm s product will however reach its potential customers even if they do not make any special effort to acquire it within the framework suggested here two conclusions are drawn first prices may serve as signals which exactly differentiate the available quality levels that is there exists a fulfilledexpectations equilibrium at which each price signals a unique quality level second the pricesignals are not arbitrary each price signal exceeds the marginal cost of producing the quality it signals such a mark up depends on the nature of the product specific information received by consumers the poorer the information the higher the mark up

econometric estimation of technical and environmental efficiency an application to dutch dairy farms in this article we estimate the technical and environmental efficiency of a panel of dutch dairy farms nitrogen surplus arising from the application of excessive amounts of manure and chemical fertilizer is treated as an environmentally detrimental input a stochastic translog production frontier is specified to estimate the output oriented technical efficiency environmental efficiency is estimated as the input oriented technical efficiency of a single input the nitrogen surplus of each farm the mean output oriented technical efficiency is rather high 0 894 but the mean input oriented environmental efficiency is only 0 441 intensive dairy farms are both technically and environmentally more efficient than extensive farms

consistent estimation of censored demand systems using panel data we derive a joint continuous censored commodity demand system for panel data applications unobserved heterogeneity is controlled for using a correlated random effects specification and a generalized method of moments framework used to estimate the model while relatively small differences in elasticity estimates are found between a flexible random effects specification and one that restricts the random effect coefficient to be time invariant larger differences are observed when comparing the flexible model to a pooled cross sectional estimator the results suggest the limited ability of such estimators to control for preference heterogeneity and unit value endogeneity leads to parameter bias

demand for meat and dairy products by turkish households a bayesian censored system approach we extend the tobit censored linear equation system procedure to utility theoretic demand functions along with a mapping mechanism to impose the adding up restriction implied by consumer utility maximization theory a theoretical restriction very often ignored in previous empirical studies with censored demand systems in this context the bayesian markov chain monte carlo mcmc procedure is applied to the censored linear approximate almost ideal demand system laids for 12 food products using data from the turkish household expenditure survey all own price elasticities are negative and expenditure elasticities positive uncompensated own price elasticities for rural households are generally much higher than those for their urban peers though demand for most food products are own price elastic for both types of households the differential patterns in demand elasticities between urban and rural households become even more evident almost twice as relatively more expensive foodstuffs are consumed showing that accessibilities to alternative products have made rural turkish households more cognizant toward price changes in foods household characteristics play a key role in food expenditures notably so in urban areas and regional and seasonal differences are also present

productivity growth and inter sector spill over in dutch horticulture 1976 1995 this article calculates nonparametric measures of total factor productivity growth on dutch horticultural firms in the period 1976 1995 individual components of total factor productivity growth i e efficiency change and technical change are regressed on socioeconomic factors reflecting the effects of the world oil crises household and demographic characteristics location and investment in physical capital also the article investigates the presence of inter sector spill overs between groups of firms with different specializations in dutch horticulture

coupon redemption and its effect on household cheese purchases by endogenizing unit value and coupon redemption we estimate u s household cheese purchase quality choice and coupon redemption equations simultaneously zero purchases and missing values on coupons and unit values are taken into account in the model to correct for selectivity bias correlations among the three equations are found to be significant empirical findings show that high quality choice significantly decreases cheese purchases while cheese coupon usage significantly increases purchases we find that higher income households select higher quality cheese while larger households choose lower quality cheese for coupon redemption we find that african american and hispanic households redeem less while asian households have no significant difference compared to caucasian households

the demand for dairy products structure prediction and decomposition this article presents an analysis of the demand for dairy products first the structure of dairy product demand is estimated using the household food consumption survey data under the assumption of a two stage budgeting procedure a complete demand system for food incorporating demographic effects is estimated next using the demand relations estimated from cross section data prediction interval tests utilizing time series data are performed for milk and butter last factors affecting consumption are classified into economic and demographic effects and a decomposition of the causes of changes in demand over time is performed

credence goods efficient labelling policies and regulatory enforcement we analyse the optimality of information revelation of hidden attributes of credence goods via alternative labelling procedures when consumers are heterogeneous in their willingness to pay for the hidden attribute producers can either self label their products or have them certified by a third party the government can impose self or third party labelling requirements on either the green or the brown producers our benchmark model develops a condition that links the optimal imposition of third party labelling to the relative market share of each type of the good under complete information we extend our analysis to incorporate asymmetric information and cheating by the producers when corrupt producers can affix spurious labels the government needs to supplement the labelling policy with costly monitoring activities we find that mandatory self labelling schemes generally dominate mandatory third party labelling unless the market share effect greatly exceeds the incentive to cheat effect

product quality and imperfect information this paper considers markets in which consumers are imperfectly informed about both product prices and quality levels offered by firms we characterize necessary and sufficient conditions for existence of the various equilibrium configurations of price and quality that can arise in two paradigm cases when all consumers prefer higher quality and when all consumers prefer lower quality our results suggest that firms will exploit imperfect information by charging noncompetitive prices as well as by offering other than ideal quality in the former case but only by changing noncompetitive prices in the latter case

quality quantity and spatial variation of price back to the bog abstract estimating potential effects of price reforms is a key issue for many developing countries demand studies increasingly use household survey data on budget shares which vary with quantity price and quality if quality response to price is ignored estimated price elasticities of quantity demand conflate responses on quantity and quality margins our review finds over 80 of published studies using budget shares from household survey data have this error we use survey data from vietnam with prices and qualities observed over space to directly estimate the price elasticity of quality this is much larger than what is derived from the income elasticity of quality based on the deaton 1988 separability restrictions across the 45 items we study the own price elasticity of quantity demand is overstated by a factor of four on average if the response of quality to price is ignored

calculating rural urban food price differentials from unit values in household expenditure surveys a comparison with existing methods and a new procedure while purchasing power parity ppp between countries has received a great deal of attention ppp calculations within countries have received less attention the idea that one unit of currency has the same purchasing power in all regions in large countries is false this paper addresses this limitation by proposing a methodology for calculating rural urban ppp in india the paper introduces a concept of item specific ppp that exploits the analogy with an item specific equivalence scale the methodology relies on demographically varying preferences to estimate ppp the results underline the need to incorporate spatial differences in ppp calculations in countries with heterogeneous preferences copyright 2012 oxford university press

analysis of food demand in vietnam and short term impacts of market shocks on quantity and calorie consumption a complete demand system for vietnam was estimated using household survey data results showed that demand for rice with respect to prices and expenditure is relatively inelastic compared to other foods demand for food in general tends to be less elastic at higher levels of income and for urban households in the short term a market shock such as a 10 decrease in income or a 30 increase in rice prices forces households to spend a larger portion of their expenditure on rice at the expense of other foods low income households face a higher risk of undernourishment as their daily calorie intake is more negatively affected by the shocks than high income households the results suggest the importance of policies that provide necessary safety net programs for the poor

inattentive consumers and product quality this paper studies a model in which some consumers shop on the basis of price alone without attention to potential differences in product quality a firm may offer a low quality product to exploit these inattentive consumers in the unique symmetric equilibrium of the model firms choose prices with mixed strategies similarly to varian 1980 in which some consumers purchase from a random seller without attention to market prices in our model though firms also choose quality stochastically and there is both price and quality dispersion two stylized policy interventions are considered competition policy which acts to increase the number of sellers and market transparency reforms which act to increase the fraction of attentive consumers with fewer inattentive consumers firms are less likely to cheat i e cut quality which therefore improves welfare but profit and consumer surplus can either increase or decrease when there is a large number of sellers approximately half the sellers cheat regardless of the fraction of inattentive consumers and introducing more sellers boosts consumers surplus and reduces profit while the impact on welfare is ambiguous

quantity and quality effects of advertising a demand system approach quantity and quality effects of advertising are investigated in this article a censored demand system is estimated for fish beef pork and other meats using norwegian household data in the demand model generic fish advertising and meat advertising is introduced as demand shifters and at the same time unit values are treated as endogenous the unit values capture the quality of the commodities empirical findings show that advertising can have both quantity and quality effects on household demand

asymmetric adjustment of dynamic factors at the firm level presents a study which addressed the deficiencies of previous studies the specification and estimation in the modeling of asymmetry and zero gross investment in the agricultural industry reference to previous studies on asymmetry information on the standard dual model results of the study

the effects of price on household demand for food and calories in poor countries are our databases giving reliable estimates food price policy relies heavily on estimated price elasticities of food demand to help balance the nutritional and economic objectives in poor countries economists use either unit values ratios of household expenditure to quantity purchased or community prices enumerated from vendors in local markets as proxies for market prices when estimating price elasticities with household survey data biases are believed to result from using unit values due to measurement error and quality effects but evidence on this issue is lacking and even less is known about community prices this article provides an empirical evidence from vietnam which suggests that economists should exercise caution when estimating price elasticities from household surveys a 14 food demand system is estimated alternatively with unit values or community prices and the elasticity of calories with respect to rice prices is calculated this elasticity is more than twice as large 0 54 versus 0 22 when community prices are used rath

prices product qualities and asymmetric information the competitive case recent developments in the economics of information emphasize the informational content of prices we examine the degree to which prices convey information on product quality to uninformed agents under perfect competition we show that a rational expectations equilibrium may not exist when an equilibrium does exist the information on quality conveyed by prices depends on the shape of the average cost curves and the relative numbers of informed and uniformed agents

estimating food demand in paraguay from household survey data we estimate a food demand system in paraguay based on the 1997 national household survey considering 12 food categories to obtain demand elasticity estimates from household survey data accounting for quality effects measurement errors and censored observations price indexes are obtained from ordinary least squares predictions of changes in unitary values caused by spatial and temporal variations and the two step estimation procedure shonkwiler and yen 1999 is applied our approach yields reasonable estimates of combined quantity and quality responses with respect to price results suggest distinct consumption behavior in urban and rural areas particularly for chicken eggs dairy and fats and oils which are likely because of differences in the food distribution system and availability of nonmarket food sources

prices and unit values in poverty measurement and tax reform analysis researchers often use unit values household expenditures on a commodity divided by the quantity purchased as proxies for market prices when calculating poverty lines and estimating consumer demand equations such proxies are often needed because community price surveys in developing economies are either absent or suffer quality problems however using unit values may result in biases due to measurement error and quality effects in a household survey experiment information on prices was obtained in three ways from unit values from a market price survey and from the opinions of householders who were shown pictures of items and asked to report the local price the three sets of price data are used to calculate poverty lines estimate price elasticities and analyze marginal tax reforms there are substantial biases when unit values are used as a proxy for market price even when sophisticated correction methods are applied performance was better for the price opinions of household members the results highlight the importance of price collection methods and the need to consider the wider costs of having potentially unreliable community level price data

effects of subsidies in russian dairy farming this study develops a microeconometric model of specialized dairy farms in the moscow region using panel data over the period 1995 2001 the model is used to analyze the role of subsidies on profit as well as input and output allocation theoretical conditions for short term profit maximization are not rejected by the data differences between farms allow for a fixed effect specification the dairy producers in the region demonstrate a low responsiveness to market signals but technology change becomes important labor land and livestock had low shadow prices although subsidies have a distorting effect on the input output mix this study shows they relieve the credit constraints on dairy farms and have an important positive influence on farm profit

engel s law and linear in moments aggregation aggregation of individual engel curves is considered such that aggregate food demand depends on the moments of the distribution of income across individuals given that aggregate demand is the sum of individual demands consistent aggregation imposes a structure called the linear in moments form this form is used to test whether the mean and second moment of income must be used to capture aggregate food demand empirical analysis strongly supports the proposition that both the mean and variance of income are required hence our results show that aggregate food demand under consistent aggregation is inherently sensitive to changes in the distribution of income

the food system transformation in developing countries a disaggregate demand analysis for fruits and vegetables in vietnam abstract food systems in developing countries are currently undergoing a rapid transformation towards high value products and modern supply chains while supply side aspects of this transformation have been analyzed previously issues of consumer demand have received much less attention this article analyses demand patterns for fresh fruits and vegetables in vietnam using household survey data and a demand systems approach demand for products from modern supply chains particularly supermarkets and non traditional imports is highly income elastic and the income effect is stronger than the impact of prices and supermarket penetration this highlights the importance of considering demand side aspects when projecting future trends our results imply a continued restructuring of the food sector in the further process of economic development

using food taxes and subsidies to achieve emission reduction targets in norway food production contributes considerably to global greenhouse gas ghg emissions animal products particularly meat from ruminants generally have higher ghg emissions than plant products over the last few decades the global per capita consumption of animal products has increased this has a negative impact on climate change land and water availability and human health we are faced with the two fold challenge of reducing ghg emissions while still producing enough food for our growing population part of the solution could be for consumers to change towards a more sustainable diet in this paper we take norway as a case study for estimating optimal taxes and subsidies on different food items which can change consumption patterns in order to reduce the ghg emissions derived from the average norwegian diet in the estimate we ensure that the average calorie intake with the new diet remains the same as with the current diet and factor in other health considerations our findings suggest that limited but useful emission reduction targets can be set with only a few changes in diets the methodology presented in this paper may be used to estimate optimal climate taxes and subsidies under different emission quantities taxes subsidies and health constraints

the implications of heterogeneous habit in consumer beverage purchases on soda and sin taxes abstract in this article we study the heterogeneity of habit strength in households demand for regular carbonated sweetened beverages csbs and beer in the united states a demand model that nests a smooth transition function is used to describe habit based consumption patterns revealing heterogeneous strengths of habits among households we find that more habitual consumers those with a strong preference for a particular product are not as sensitive to price or expenditure as the aggregate population this finding is further supported by simulations of the potential effects of soda and beer taxes we find the aggregate response to soda and beer taxes is smaller than when the influence of habit is assumed to be homogeneous

the demand for meat and fish in spain urban and rural areas abstract the aim of the paper is to explain to what extent meat consumption patterns in spain are different in rural and urban areas and which are the factors explaining differences and similarities a demand system using cross section data from the latest spanish national survey has been estimated unit values have been used instead of market prices and price and quality effects have been obtained the main conclusion is that meat consumption patterns in urban and rural areas are not really different as regards economic factors some small income and price effect differences have been found specially for fresh pork and fish responses to changes in income and price are higher for fresh pork consumption in rural areas and for fish in urban areas

preferences spatial prices and inequality abstractthis study examines the effect of prices on inequality in rural india during the period of economic reforms and beyond 1999 2000 2009 2010 it proposes a framework for calculating exact price indices based on the exact affine stone index easi demand system and shows its usefulness by calculating spatial prices and regionally varying temporal prices that allow for both differences in preferences between states and over time the study finds that the nature of inflation has been regressive during 1999 2000 2004 2005 and progressive during 2004 2005 2009 2010 and that the effects of temporal price inflation and spatial prices on inequality are qualitatively different

honest certification and the threat of capture abstract this paper derives conditions under which reputation enables certifiers to resist capture these conditions alone have strong implications for the industrial organization of certification markets 1 honest certification requires high prices that may even exceed the static monopoly price 2 honest certification exhibits economies of scale and constitutes a natural monopoly 3 price competition tends to a monopolization the results derive from a general principle of reputation models that favors concentration this principle implies benefits from specialization and explains specialized certifiers as efficient market institutions that sell reputation as a service to other firms

estimation of complete demand systems from household budget data the linear and quadratic expenditure systems in this paper we explore two issues in empirical demand analysis the estimation of complete systems of demand equations using household budget data section i and the incorporation of demographic characteristics into such systems section ii although there are numerous studies which use time series data to estimate complete demand systems and many which estimate engel curves from household budget data there are virtually none which combine budget data from different periods to estimate complete systems since each budget study corresponds to a single price situation one might conjecture that estimation of complete systems would not be possible unless budget studies were available from a large number of periods this is incorrect in section i we argue that interesting complete demand systems can be estimated from a small number of budget studies despite the limited price variability represented in such data to demonstrate this we use budget study data for two periods to estimate a pair of related demand systems the familiar linear expenditure system les and a quadratic expenditure system qes a generalization of les in which the demand equations are quadratic in total expenditure the inclusion of demographic variables in the analysis of household consumption patterns is desirable because there are likely to be systematic differences in the consumption behavior of households with different demographic characteristics but the effects of demographic characteristics have seldom been studied within the framework of complete demand systems in section ii we propose translating as a general method for incorporating demographic variables into complete systems of demand equations this method has not previously been discussed as a general technique for bringing demographic variables into demand systems although it has been employed in several studies to improve the estimates of the les and the qes presented in section i we reestimate these two systems using translating to incorporate family size

adult equivalence scales and food expenditures an application to mexican beef and pork purchases in the analysis of food expenditures the use of a simple count of household members as an estimate of household size implicitly assumes each household member has the same marginal impact in this analysis of mexican food expenditures endogenously determined adult equivalence scales are estimated in such a way that these marginal impacts are allowed to vary by household member age and gender the results of a series of hypothesis tests indicate a rejection of the implied null hypothesis of equal marginal expenditure impacts associated with the use of the traditional count based household size variable this study also rejects the null hypothesis of the equality of adult equivalent scales across the commodities included in this analysis

modelling household purchasing behaviour to analyse beneficial marketing strategies price promotion and generic advertising are two common strategies to increase consumer demand for food products which one is preferred over the other depends largely on the relative importance of

adjusting vat rates to promote healthier diets in norway a censored quantile regression approach the effects of health related taxes and subsidies on food and beverages have mainly been investigated using models that assume identical price responses among high and low consuming households diet related health problems are however more likely among households with high intakes of unhealthy foods or low intakes of healthy foods than in households with average intakes in this article we focus on purchases of healthy and unhealthy foods among low median and high purchasing households the effects of an increase in the norwegian value added tax vat on some unhealthy foods and a removal of the vat on some healthy foods are investigated using censored quantile regressions we reject equality of the own price elasticities for eight of nine food and beverage groups we find that a vat increase is more effective in reducing purchases of unhealthy foods among high purchasing households than a vat removal is in increasing the purchases of healthy foods among low purchasing households

the quantity and variety of households meat purchases a censored demand system approach this study investigates the demand for 10 disaggregated meat products by u s households a censored demand system which imposes budget constraints in both observed and latent shares is estimated along with a detailed explanation of the estimation procedure additional details about the methodology not provided in previous studies should help researchers to empirically apply the model an innovation of the study is to introduce the censored demand system model for studying the variety of a household s food purchases most households buy between seven and eight different products and hardly change the variety of their purchases with changes in meat expenditure