willingness to pay for the green food in china abstract with use of payment card survey data of willingness to pay wtp for the green food a unique food certification in china this study finds that age and income are important for the wtp for the green food in china there are structural differences in consumer preference for green food between the large city and the small county consumers in china on average are willing to pay 47 more for green vegetables and 40 more for green meat than for their conventional counterparts compared with the real markets and the previous studies our results are very consistent and reliable

demand elasticities for food products in brazil a two stage budgeting system the object of this article is to estimate demand elasticities for a basket of staple food important for providing the caloric needs of brazilian households these elasticities are useful in the measurement of the impact of structural reforms on poverty a two stage demand system was constructed based on data from household expenditure surveys pof produced by ibge the brazilian bureau of statistics in 1987 88 and 1995 96 we have used panel data to estimate the model and have calculated income own price and cross price elasticities for eight groups of goods and services and in the second stage for 11 sub groups of staple food products we estimated those elasticities for the whole sample of consumers and for two income groups

crises food prices and the income elasticity of micronutrients estimates from indonesia the 2008 global food price crisis and more recent food price spikes have led to a greater focus on policies and programs to cushion the effects of such shocks on poverty and malnutrition analysis of the income elasticities of micronutrients and their changes during food price crises can shed light on the potential effectiveness of cash transfer and nutrition supplement programs this article examines these issues using data from two cross sectional household surveys in indonesia taken before 1996 and soon after 1999 the 1997 98 economic crisis which led to a sharp increase in food prices first using nonparametric and regression methods the article examines how the income elasticity of calories from starchy staples as a share of total calories differs between the two survey rounds second the article estimates income elasticities of important nutrients in indonesia the analysis finds that although summary measures such as the income elasticity of the starchy staple ratio might not change during crises this stability masks important differences across individual nutrients in particular income elasticities of some key micronutrients such as iron calcium and vitamin b1 are significantly higher in a crisis year than in a normal year yet the income elasticities of others such as vitamin c remain close to zero these results suggest that cash transfer programs might be even more effective during crises to ensure the consumption of essential micronutrients but to ensure that all key micronutrients are consumed nutrition supplement programs are also likely required jel classification codes i12 o12 d12 e31 keywords income elasticity crisis prices micronutrients vitamin c starchy staple ratio

can economic incentives encourage actual reductions in pesticide use and environmental spillovers chemical pesticides constitute an important input in crop production but their indiscriminate use can impact negatively agricultural productivity human health and the environment recently attention is focused on the use of economic incentives to reduce pesticide use and its related indirect effects the aim of this work is to assess the effectiveness of different economic instruments such as taxes and levies in encouraging farmers to decrease pesticide use and their environmental spillovers a policy simulation model is employed using data from dutch cash crop producers including two pesticide categories that differ in terms of toxicity and pesticides environmental spillovers four different instruments were selected for evaluation pesticide taxes price penalties on pesticides environmental spillovers subsidies and quotas the results of the study indicate that even high taxes and penalties would result in a small decrease in pesticide use and environmental spillovers taxes that differentiate according to toxicity do not lead to substitution of high with low toxicity pesticides subsidies on low toxicity products are not able to affect the use of high toxicity products pesticide quotas are more effective in reducing pesticide use and environmental spillovers

ending food subsidies nutritional welfare and budgetary effects governments faced with growing budget deficits are cutting many social expenditures including costly food subsidy programs that have provided benefits to the rich and poor alike since the poor spend a larger share of their income on food than do the rich these cuts usually have negative distributional welfare and nutritional effects this article discusses the methodological issues in estimating the effects of price and tax reforms in developing countries the author applies a model that deaton developed 1988 to estimate price elasticities from cross section data the only reliable and detailed data available in most developing countries measures of both real income and nutrition are used to evaluate the effects of changes in the moroccan food subsidy program the analysis suggests that subsidies on inferior foods not consumed by the wealthy would reduce the welfare costs to the poor and limit the budgetary expenditures required

energy consumption and urban sprawl evidence for the spanish case residential electricity consumption constitutes one of the largest sources of spanish final energy demand to improve electricity savings policies oriented towards efficiency in residential consumption such as replacement of appliances or the construction of nearly zero energy buildings have been suggested and implemented however the potential relevance of urban structural characteristics such as the increase in detached houses in sprawling residential areas has not often been considered the aim of this research is to analyse the relevance of living in a detached house located in a dispersed urban area to household electricity consumption thus an electricity consumption model is estimated by using household socioeconomic variables and including urban characteristics as its determinants such us the level of urban agglomeration or whether families live in detached sprawling homes the model is estimated by using 2014 household budget survey hbs microdata and applying ordinary least squares ols as well as quantile regressions qr as econometric procedures endogeneity problems are corrected by means of instrumental variables the results confirm that living in a detached house significantly increases electricity consumption whereas urban agglomerations have the opposite effect sprawl is occurring rapidly in spanish cities and according to our results it could constitute a relevant source of increase in electricity demand in the following years

replacement of agricultural price supports by area payments in the european union and the effects on pesticide use this article determines the contribution of recent european union agricultural policy reforms on the use of pesticides our theoretical model extends the multioutput generalization of the lichtenberg zilberman damage control technology model developed by chambers and lichtenberg our empirical analysis uses farm level data for a sample of french farms results suggest that price effects on the use of pesticides are always more elastic than area payment effects this indicates that policy reforms consisting of a reduction in price supports in favor of area payments may reduce application of crop protection inputs such policy changes which represent a certain degree of decoupling took place under the 1992 common agricultural policy reforms

international income inequality measuring ppp bias by estimating engel curves for food there are large differences between rich and poor people in the world this is of major concern to economists as well as to policy makers the magnitude of the dif ferences however depends on the measure used for comparisons to illustrate per capita income in china is more than five times larger if one uses penn world table pwt 1 incomes rather than exchange rate based ex incomes in this paper we study pwt incomes which aim at correcting for price level dif ferences across countries and identify the bias in them by estimating engel curves for food furthermore we study the relationship between the bias and the income of a country the pwt produces purchasing power parity ppp adjusted incomes and thus the associated bias is referred to as the ppp bias having estimated the bias in pwt incomes we provide new estimates of real income and refer to these as the engel curve ec incomes by comparing the estimated ec incomes and the pwt incomes the issue of how the bias influences estimated inequality is discussed finally we discuss whether ex incomes which simply transform each country s nominal income into one common currency provide better estimates of income than do pwt incomes this paper reports three main findings first there is substantial and systematic ppp bias in the pwt incomes the poorer the country the more its income tends to be overestimated 2 second the ppp bias causes a substantial and robust underesti mation of international inequality the gini index increases substantially when one adjusts for the bias third whereas pwt incomes provide better estimates than the ex incomes for the richer countries the ex incomes which implicitly assume that ppp holds provide better estimates for the poorer countries as we know that price levels differ across countries there is consensus that the seminal work on establishing the pwt was a well founded initiative and the data have been extensively used 3 still although many studies rely on pwt data few focus on the ppp bias in this dataset some contributors focus on one component of the bias however the so called substitution bias and use macro data to measure this

hedging foreign exchange exposures independent vs integrative approaches many financial managers think that foreign exchange hedging decisions are mainly a choice between to hedge or not to hedge nevertheless previous researchers applied ederington s portfolio approach and found that even for risk minimization a complete hedge does not lead to the lowest risk instead there exists an optimal hedging ratio which yields the lowest variance however the discussions of these former studies were concentrated on a single foreign currency cash flow in the real world financial managers are more likely to expect multiple cash flows arriving at different times even for the same foreign currency this paper therefore discusses whether financial managers should hedge these cash flows independently or combine them under one integrative hedging scheme it is shown that while the independent approach does not lead to the lowest risk its hedging effectiveness is close to that of the integrative approach given the time and resource constraints of financial managers the simpler independent approach appears to be a better choice

quality quantity and spatial variation of price this paper develops and implements a method for estimating price elasticities of demand using cross sectional household survey data geographically clustered households report unit values which when corrected for quality effects and for measurement error indicate the underlying spatial variation in prices and can be matched to variation in demand patterns a simple model of quality choice is proposed while the correction for measurement error exploits the clustered design of such surveys data from a 1979 household survey from the ivory coast are used to estimate price elasticities for beef meat fish cereals and starches copyright 1988 by american economic association

do government food price policies affect the prevalence of obesity empirical evidence from egypt summary obesity has become one of the most serious but neglected global public health problems especially in developing countries i examine the impact of the egyptian food subsidy program on mothers weight it is hypothesized that the program causes a wide disparity in per calorie costs between energy dense and energy dilute foods and thus aggravating the obesity problem the estimated elasticities reveal that mothers bmi is inversely related to the price of subsidized energy dense food and directly to the price of a high diet quality but expensive food items suggesting that the program aggravates obesity by lowering the direct costs of becoming obese

international diversification of investment portfolios u s and japanese perspectives in this paper we analyze the gains from international diversification of investment portfolios from the japanese as well as the u s perspectives the major findings of this paper include first the potential gains from international as opposed to purely domestic diversification are much greater for u s investors than for japanese investors for u s investors the gains accrue not so much in terms of lower risk as in terms of higher return and the opposite holds for japanese investors second using various ex ante international investment strategies designed to control parameter uncertainty u s investors can realize substantial gains from international diversification in out of sample periods japanese investors however can gain relatively little third hedging exchange risk generally allows the u s but not japanese investors to benefit more from international diversification for u s investors the international bond diversification with exchange risk hedging offers a superior risk return trade off than the international stock diversification with or without hedging

estimating ex ante cost functions for stochastic technologies this paper revisits the problem of estimating ex ante cost functions previously studied by pope and just in 1996 as well as moschini in 2001 an ex ante cost function that generalizes their ex ante cost functions is introduced and an econometric procedure for estimating a flexible approximation to it is developed that generalized cost function is economically relevant not only for the pope and just 1996 choice setting but for general producer risk preferences general stochastic technologies and general forms of price uncertainty an econometric strategy for estimating the resulting cost structure that adapts moschini s 2001 full information approach is developed followed by an econometric application to u s agriculture

management of foreign exchange risk a review article this paper reviews the literature on foreign exchange risk management ferm which has burgeoned during the last decade scholars and practioners emerging interest in foreign exchange risk management was spurred by the advent of fluctuating exchange rates in the early seventies as well as by the pronouncement of the infamous fasb statement no 8 in 1976 which laid down unambiguous guidelines for consolidating financial statements of multinational corporations a normative rather than a market view of foreign exchange risk management is taken and accordingly the author reviews first the two key informational inputs necessary for any foreign exchange risk management program forecasting exchange rates and measuring exposure to exchange risk available decision models for handling transaction and translation exposures are reviewed next a concluding section identifies gaps in the existing literature and suggests directions for future research

profit supply and factor demand functions comment in lau and yotopoulos 1972 a new method of estimating production relations was developed building on lau and yotopoulos 1971 this method bringing together estimates of profit and factor demand functions was further developed in yotopoulos and lau to incorporate a test of rationality their method has since been applied by yotopoulos lau and lin sidhu sidhu and baanante 1979 1981 jamison and lau and junankar 1980a b 1982 because the assumption of rationality is so fundamental to economics and because few tests of this hypothesis exist the lau yotopoulos method is very important however these studies rest on advanced economic theory and sophisticated econometrics so it is easy to be intimidated by them sophisticated estimators however are not necessarily free from er

hedging and competition abstract we consider firms that all else equal wish to minimize variability in their internal capital due to convex costs of raising external funds the firms can hedge the cash flow risk of the project but not that of winning or losing the auction we characterize optimal hedging and bidding strategies in this competition framework we show that access to financial markets makes firms bid more aggressively possibly even above their valuation for the project in addition hedging increases the variance of bids and makes firm values more dispersed further with hedging the covariance of internal capital changes with the risk factor is negative and is more negative the higher the correlation of the hedging instrument with the risk factor

modeling supply response in a multiproduct framework the paper models multiproduct supply response in agriculture and tests key assumptions traditionally maintained in supply response studies the technology is approximated by a restricted profit function the properties of the restricted profit function are imposed during estimation the hypothesis that maintains the existence of output price and quantity indexes that satisfy the adding up property is rejected the existence of individual production functions for each output is also rejected unless joint production is permitted the estimates of responsiveness of a particular commodity to changes in own price or prices of competing outputs are likely to be considerably understated

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

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

estimating a demand system with nonnegativity constraints mexican meat demand a new information based approach for estimating systems of many equations with nonnegativity constraints is presented this approach called generalized maximum entropy gme is more practical and

the distributional impacts of indonesia s financial crisis on household welfare analyzing the distributional impacts of economic crises is an ever more pressing need if policymakers are to intervene to help those most adversely affected they need to identify those who have been hurt most and estimate the magnitude of the harm they have suffered they must also respond in a timely manner this article develops a simple methodology for measuring these effects and applies it to analyze the impact of the indonesian economic crisis on household welfare using only pre crisis household information it estimates the compensating variation for indonesian households following the 1997 asian currency crisis and then explores the results with flexible nonparametric methods it finds that virtually every household was severely affected although the urban poor fared the worst the ability of poor rural households to produce food mitigated the worst consequences of the high inflation the distributional consequences are the same whether or not households are permitted to substitute toward relat

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

factors influencing the profitability of fertilizer use on maize in zambia major findings the additional maize produced from a given amount of fertilizer applied varied widely across households even after largely controlling for soil and rainfall conditions the median estimated response rate was 15 9kgs of maize per kg nitrogen applied under the range of conditions and smallholder management practices average maizefertilizer response rates declined as the application rate increased beyond 2 bags of urea and 2 bags of d compound factors raising the response rate and profitability of fertilizer use included timely availability application rates less than the moa 4x4 recommendation use of animal draft power in land preparation and use of hybrid seed in remote areas and given current management practices fertilizer use appears to be profitable only for a minority of smallholder farmers in the relatively remote areas for farmers in the more accessible areas profitability of fertilizer use depends on timely availability if fertilizer is not available on time even farmers in the more accessible parts of this area of relatively high agronomic suitability for maize production are largely unable to use fertilizer profitably because over 30 percent of the households reported that fertilizer was delivered late these findings indicate that efforts to ensure timely distribution can contribute substantially to the productivity gains achievable from fertilizer use

the hedging of an uncertain future foreign currency cash flow this paper derives the optimal hedge of an uncertain unknown quantity future foreign currency cash flow this more general optimal hedge includes the traditional hedge for a certain known quantity future foreign currency cash flow as a special case the optimal hedge is found to be unbounded and determined by firm specific conditions including the variance of the expected cash flow and the correlation of that future cash flow with actual exchange rate movements simulated optimal hedge values are found for u s based multinational firms possessing s dm cash flows using exchange rate data for the 1981 1987 period special cases in which the optimal hedge ratio equals zero and one also are identified and we show that cash flow uncertainty can strongly affect the effectiveness of hedging

effective costs and chemical use in united states agricultural production using the environment as a free input a cost function based production model is used to represent patterns of input use and output production in u s agriculture and the implied costs of induced reductions in risk from agricultural chemicals bad outputs we estimate and evaluate shadow values for these harmful outputs and the implied input and output specific substitution patterns with a focus on the impacts on pesticide demand and its quality and quantity components using state level data we find these measures to be statistically significant vary substantively by region and imply increased demand for effective pesticides associated with improvements in quality from embodied technology copyright 2002 oxford university press

sub therapeutic antibiotics and the efficiency of u s hog farms antimicrobial drugs are frequently fed to hogs at sub therapeutic levels to promote feed efficiency and growth however in response to concerns that sub therapeutic antibiotics stas are promoting the development of antimicrobial drug resistant bacteria the u s food and drug administration recently adopted a strategy to phase out antibiotics for such production uses this study uses a stochastic frontier model to estimate the costs to u s hog producers of a ban on stas for growth promotion to address potential sample selection issues we employ a recently developed empirical approach that corrects for biases from both observed and unobserved variables

simple econometrics of pesticide productivity this paper develops a multioutput generalization of the lichtenberg zilberman damage control technology the dual representation of the technology is shown to be conditionally additive in the price of abatement activities and other prices an econometric procedure for estimating the dual technology is developed and applied to an aggregate u s agricultural data set the conditionally additive nature of the model allows estimation of pest damage from the dual technology our estimates of aggregate u s pest damage are much lower than previous estimates

optimal hedging of uncertain and long term foreign exchange exposure abstract this paper employs stochastic dynamic programming to analyze two hedging problems which arise frequently especially in international finance one is the hedging of an uncertain exposure when the arrival of new information is anticipated it is shown that a risk averse agent will hedge a fraction of his maximum potential exposure to reduce risk the second problem concerns hedging an exposure which extends beyond the delivery date of the available forward contract the solution yields a rule by which successive contracts can be linked to form an optimal hedging strategy a short empirical study illustrates this rule

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

exchange rate uncertainty forward contracts and international portfolio selection in this paper ex ante efficient portfolio selection strategies are developed to realize potential gains from international diversification under flexible exchange rates it is shown that exchange rate uncertainty is a largely nondiversiflable factor adversely affecting the performance of international portfolios therefore it is essential to effectively control exchange rate volatility for that purpose two methods of exchange risk reduction are simultaneously employed multicurrency diversification and hedging via forward exchange contracts the empirical findings show that international portfolio selection strategies designed to control both estimation and exchange risks almost consistently outperform the u s domestic portfolio in out of sample periods since grubel 11 applied modern portfolio theory mpt to international investment various authors such as levy and sarnat 17 solnik 20 and lessard 16 have examined the gains from international diversification of investment portfolios for the purpose of establishing the gains from international diversification these studies constructed international portfolios using historical risk and return data from a period of fixed or relatively stable exchange rates and showed that internationally diversified portfolios dominated purely domestic portfolios in terms of mean variance efficiency from the standpoint of today s investors however the previous studies fail to offer operational guidance for international diversification for two important reasons first it is now questionable whether the past findings are still relevant under the current flexible exchange rate regime second by being ex post in nature the past studies ignored the issue of estimation risk or parameter uncertainty and therefore may have overstated the realizable portion of the potential gains from international diversification fluctuating exchange rates are likely to mitigate the potential gains from international diversification by making investment in foreign securities more risky as will be shown later a fluctuating exchange rate contributes to the risk of foreign investment not only through its own variance but also through its positive covariances with the local stock market returns during our sample period of 1980 through 1985 for example exchange rate volatility is found to account for about fifty percent of the volatility of dollar returns from investment in the stock markets of such major countries as germany japan and the u k furthermore the exchange rate changes vis a vis the u s dollar are found to be

recovering the shadow value of nutrients this article investigates the shadow values of twenty eight different nutrients it links the unit price of foods to the shadow values of nutrients by building on a utility theoretic model first proposed by gorman maximum entropy principles are then used to reason consistently about the values of the parameters of interest the resulting estimates are discussed and analyzed

an econometric analysis of demand for food quantity and quality in urban china this article offers an analytical framework for studying consumer demand for food quality based on a theory consistent demand model namely the exact affine stone index specification importantly it accounts for unobserved consumer and regional heterogeneity and allows for arbitrary engel curves the empirical value of our framework is illustrated in an econometric analysis of demand for food quality in china evaluating possible structural changes in consumer food expenditures in china is of paramount importance given the ever increasing global role of china and the implications of the structural food preference changes for the global food system the major findings emerging from this study indicate that income is an important determinant of demand for food quality and quantity with the relatively more affluent provinces having a higher affinity for food quality

integrating agronomic principles into production function specification a dichotomy of growth inputs and facilitating inputs this article presents a general conceptual framework for integrating agronomic principles into economic production analysis we categorize inputs in crop production into growth inputs and facilitating inputs based on this dichotomy we specify an asymmetric production function the robustness of the asymmetric framework is tested using crop level panel data on potato production in the netherlands the test results do not reject the proposed framework and the asymmetric specification better represents the underlying production technology

measuring and understanding behavior welfare and poverty angus deaton delivered his prize lecture on tuesday 8 december 2015 at the aula magna stockholm university these are the lecture slides this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

optimal bidding and hedging in international markets this paper examines the optimal bidding and hedging decisions of a risk averse contractor for a construction project abroad we show that currency options play no role as a hedging instrument when the contractor has a quadratic utility function however if the contractor is prudent currency options are used for hedging purposes prudence thus generates a hedging demand for currency options when foreign exchange exposure is uncertain contrary to the conventional wisdom we show that currency hedging may have perverse effects on the contractor s bidding behavior in a canonical example with negative exponential utility functions we demonstrate that the possibilities for the contractor to bid more aggressively in the absence of currency hedging are not factitious

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

cereal price shocks and volatility in sub saharan africa what really matters for farmers welfare the lack of information as well as some misperceptions about the distinction between the welfare consequences of higher versus more volatile cereal prices has limited the effectiveness of policy interventions during the recent food crises in many developing countries this article proposes an integrated empirical strategy to investigate and compare the different effects of these two phenomena and tests it using nationally representative household survey data from four sub saharan countries results show that the negative impacts of a cereal price increase substantially outweigh the effects of price volatility on household welfare across the entire income distribution the amplitude and the distribution of those effects depend heavily on specific factors such as the weight of food consumption over total expenditure the budget share devoted to cereals the substitution effect among food groups and the relative number of net sellers versus net buyers accessing the market we also show that volatility mainly harms the poorest quintile of the population

quality measurement errors and profit function estimation abstract a producer demand profit function estimator is developed which uses the structure of clustered samples to estimate the importance of variations in factor quality and errors in measurement of the wage and to correct for biases caused by these factors

another look at pesticide productivity and pest damage using the lichtenberg zilberman fox weersink damage specification we develop a short run supply response framework based on rational producer behavior in the presence of damage agents we show how representation can be used to measure and decompose the economic damage associated with the presence of pests how to measure the shadow prices of damage control agents how to measure the manner in which pesticide application biases variable input use and how pesticide application affects the relative returns to quasi fixed factors of production an econometric version of the model is estimated using a panel data set on greek olive producers both our theoretical and our empirical results suggest that the most traditional measure of pest damage understates actual economic losses and revenue losses due to pests

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

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

demand systems with unit values a comparison of two specifications abstract household expenditure surveys recording quantities allow the estimation of price reactions on the basis of unit values comparing two specifications that account for quality effects in unit values we find large differences in price elasticities and even sign reversals

the economics and econometrics of damage control concern for the potentially harmful side effects of agricultural chemical inputs especially pesticides highlights the need to accurately determine the economic levels of their use we consider three model specification issues interaction of direct production inputs with damage control inputs in damage abatement justification for a priori exclusion of production inputs from the abatement function and the motivations and consequences of alternative stochastic specifications empirical analysis using farm level data shows that misspecification of the stochastic element in the production function can overestimate the marginal physical productivity of pesticides and grossly underestimate the responsiveness of demand to increases in pesticide prices

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

currency options and the optimal hedging of contingent foreign exchange exposure foreign exchange transaction exposures over the complete range of probabilities as well the optimal forward and option hedge alternatives three utility functions are used covering a wide range of risk postures in marked contrast with the virtually universal endorsement of option hedging contingent exposures to be found in the financial management literature our results indicate that options have little if any useful role to play in the hedging of transaction exposures of any sort

a nonparametric analysis of agricultural technology u s agricultural technology and technical change are analyzed nonparametrically under cost minimization and profit maximization based on annual data for 1948 83 various separability hypotheses concerning the aggregate production function for u s agriculture are investigated the proposed nonparametric approach also provides some insights into the nature of technical change

measuring the marginal cost of nonuniform environmental regulations a method is presented for measuring the marginal welfare cost of environmental regulations affecting agriculture the method incorporates output market effects and recognizes diversity in production conditions among crops regions and seasons an important advantage of the method is that only regional outputs and changes in regional production costs are needed to calculate deadweight loss thus simplifying the measurement of welfare changes this feature of the model is significant since the complexity and substantial data requirements of most existing impact models cause many environmental regulations to be enacted with inadequate analysis of their economic impacts the method also disaggregates welfare impacts by crop place and time thus encouraging the implementation of nonuniform interventions that achieve a given level of environmental quality more efficiently than uniform policies

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

damage control econometrics functional specification and pesticide productivity empirical studies of pesticide productivity have often concluded that the value of marginal product of pesticide exceeds marginal factor cost despite anecdotal and other evidence to the contrary this article presents estimates of pesticide productivity derived from alternative functional specifications of pesticide involvement in production results suggest that explanation of the magnitude of pesticide productivity estimates obtained in empirical studies may lie somewhere other than with functional specification

the short run impact of import bans on poverty the case of nigeria 2008 2012 the nigerian government uses food import prohibition as part of policies that seeks to protect existing domestic producers and reduce the country s dependence on imports this paper argues that such policies have negative effects on net consumers of such products due to higher prices with 70 percent of poor households budget spent on food and about 13 percent of the total budget devoted to products subject to import bans poor households are vulnerable to such trade policies prices of some import prohibited food products are found to be higher than what they would be in the absence of such bans the elimination of import bans is estimated to reduce national poverty rates by as much as 2 6 percentage points

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

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