This study examines the impacts of two types of advertising content—healthy eating and anti-obesity advertising—on the demand for healthy and unhealthy food and beverage items. We show that differentiating consumers by weight is crucial in fully understanding the effects of advertising content on food and beverage demand. We find that among overweight individuals, anti-obesity advertisements are more effective than healthy eating advertisements at reducing the demand for unhealthy items and increasing the demand for healthy items. Furthermore, the magnitude of this effect increases with BMI. We discuss possible explanations and policy implications based on our results.

This study explores factors affecting adoption of two stormwater management practices, rain gardens and rain barrels. Mail survey data from Columbia, Missouri indicate adoption rates of 3.12 percent (rain gardens) and 7.47 percent (rain barrels). This unique dataset enables us to distinguish among nonadopters using knowledge levels, and to investigate the effect of practice-specific barriers. Clustered multinomial logistic regressions reveal serious gardeners are more likely to adopt both practices. Specific barriers differ by practice and type of nonadopter. Adding practice-specific barriers increased pseudo R2 values from 0.12 to 0.22 for rain gardens and from 0.13 to 0.26 for rain barrels.

Progressive salinization of water and soil will be increasingly severe in low-lying coastal areas as climate change proceeds. Thus, understanding the economic impacts of salinity intrusion will be essential for effective adaptation planning. This paper uses econometric analysis to predict the impact of climate-induced increases in soil salinity on high-yielding-variety rice production in coastal Bangladesh. Findings indicate an output decline of 15.6 percent in nine subdistricts where soil salinity will exceed 4 deciSiemens per meter before 2050. Without new adaptation strategies, the predicted changes will result in 7.7 and 5.6 percent losses in the Barisal and Chittagong regions, respectively.

Conservation tillage offers economic and soil quality benefits, yet conventional tillage remains the prevailing system in some regions. The purpose of this study is to identify the effect of profitability factors, risk attitudes, crop rotations, and other farmer and farm characteristics on farmers’ choices to use no-till (NT), strip-till (ST) and reduced/conventional tillage (RCT) in producing dryland corn, wheat, and soybean in Kansas. The results show that factors such as crop yields, risk aversion, crop insurance, baling and grazing of crop residue, crop acreage, and farmers’ approach to adopting new technologies are significant factors in farmers’ choice of tillage practice.

The beverage sector plays an important role in consumers' daily diet. Recent declines in fruit beverage and soft drink consumption may be a reflection of changing consumers' lifestyles and perceptions. This study uses recent scanner data to develop a demand analysis to examine the competition of various beverages. To obtain reliable demand and elasticity estimates, we test for valid aggregations using the generalized composite commodity theorem. Results suggest that while consumers substitute refrigerated juice with low calorie drinks, a larger proportion of consumers substitute regular soft drinks with fruit drinks.

Design of government policies that seek greater adoption of anaerobic digesters can benefit from a greater understanding of the motivations for adoption. Using a nationwide survey of U.S. dairy and swine producers, this study seeks to determine how policies, peer group influences, environmental beliefs, and farm characteristics affect the decision to adopt a digester. Results suggest that neighborhood effects, farm type and size, and nonmarket benefits of anaerobic digestion are important for predicting whether or not a producer will consider this technology for manure management. However, the decision to actually adopt is more dependent on government policies and economic considerations.

Withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) could be costly for U.S. beef exports to Japan given existing trade agreements such as the Japan-Australia Economic Partnership Agreement (JAEPA). We estimate the demand for imported beef in Japan by source and product and assess the impact of tariff reductions on exporting countries. Our results suggest JAEPA will result in considerable increases in Australian beef exports to Japan, largely at the expense of the U.S. beef. However, similar tariff reductions for U.S. beef could eliminate these negative effects and even result in a net increase in beef imports from both countries.

Policy-critical, micro-level statistical data are often unavailable at the desired level of disaggregation. We present a Bayesian methodology for “downscaling” aggregated count data to the micro level, using an outside statistical sample. Our procedure combines numerical simulation with exact calculation of combinatorial probabilities. We motivate our approach with an application estimating the number of farms in a region, using count totals at higher levels of aggregation. In a simulation analysis over varying population sizes, we demonstrate both robustness to sampling variability and outperformance relative to maximum likelihood. Spatial considerations, implementation of “informative” priors, non-spatial classification problems, and best practices are discussed.