The seafood market has changed substantially in recent decades, becoming increasingly globalized. This has led to introduction of new species and new sources of fish in most markets. We estimate a seafood demand system that, unlike models in previous studies, accounts for potential structural shifts caused by these market changes. We investigate the impact of tilapia as a new species and China as a new source on demand for imported whitefish in the United States. The results indicate that price flexibilities change substantially over time and that the structural shift takes place over a prolonged period.

This paper develops a logit-based conjoint analysis of willingness to pay for individual attributes of deer-hunting trips. Since deer-hunting success is uncertain, willingness to pay for enhanced likelihood of bagging a deer, rather than for certain success, is evaluated. Implicit costs of recreational travel time are also evaluated from hypothetical trade-offs between travel time and trip expenditures. The valuation of travel time derived here appears to reflect more the opportunity cost of foregone hunting than the opportunity cost of foregone work. This implies that travel-cost analyses of recreational demand, which impute costs of recreational travel solely from wage data, can yield biased valuations of recreational amenities.

The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA) prohibits health claims for foods containing more than a certain amount of fat per serving. This disqualifier level eliminates health claims for cooking oils since these products have approximately 14 grams of fat per serving, above the acceptable threshold. However, a number of scientific studies indicate that, from a heart-health perspective, cooking oils lower in saturated fat and higher in monounsaturated fats are superior to other oils. Prior to the NLEA, firms actively competed on this basis, with manufacturers of cooking oils making explicit heart-health claims in print advertising and labeling. This study utilizes supermarket scanner data from twenty stores to examine the type of cooking oil chosen by consumers. The results indicate that after implementation of the NLEA, consumers shifted purchases toward cooking oils higher in saturated fat and lower in monounsaturated fat. This study does not address whether consumers changed their total consumption of cooking oil after implementation of the NLEA.

Public discourse suggests a lack of consensus in the United States regarding the environmental impacts of shale gas development. Newly available shale gas has reduced the cost of electricity and heating and replaced coal, but public fears about the environment threaten to curtail those gains. We designed the first survey-based analysis of the views of government, industry, academic, and nongovernmental experts to identify their priorities for regulation and voluntary action among 264 routine and 14 accidental environmental risk “pathways.” We find that nongovernmental experts select many more problems but that there is considerable agreement on the most important ones, which can guide research, policies, and practices so that shale gas benefits continue and environmental impacts are limited.

Three conjoint models—a traditional ratings model, a ratings difference specification, and a binary response model—were used to value groundwater protection program alternatives. The last, which is virtually identical to a dichotomous choice contingent valuation specification, produced the smallest value estimates. This suggests that the conjoint model is very sensitive to model specification and that traditional conjoint models may overestimate economic value because many respondents are not in the market for the commodity being valued.

Common marketing strategies include emphasizing products’ “green” or environmentally friendly attributes and characteristics to appeal to a growing market of environmentally conscious consumers. While previous studies have used product labels such as “eco-friendly,” “environmentally friendly,” and “sustainable” to investigate consumer preferences, relatively little is known about how consumer perceptions as a pre-decision mechanism impact their preferences and choice behaviors. Using data collected through an online survey of U.S. and Canadian consumers, we investigate systematic differences in individuals’ perceptions of the terms “eco-friendly” and “sustainable.” Marketing implications for the food and green (i.e., greenhouse/nursery producers, suppliers, and retailers) industries are discussed.

Radial and nonradial measures of technical efficiency are calculated empirically for Florida vegetable farms using DEA (data envelopment analysis) techniques. Use of the nonradial measures to calculate overuse of chemical inputs by inefficient farmers is demonstrated and the potential for reduced environmental loading of pesticides and fertilizers by improving efficiency is evaluated.

Conjoint analysis is used to evaluate consumer preferences for three consumer-ready products derived from crawfish. Utility functions are estimated using two-limit tobit and ordered probit models. The results show women prefer a baked nugget or popper type product, whereas 35- to 44-year-old men prefer a microwavable nugget or patty type product. The results also show little difference between part-worth estimates or predicted rankings for the tobit and ordered probit models, implying the results are not sensitive to assumptions regarding the ordinal and cardinal nature of respondent preferences.

Recent federal agricultural programs have accelerated the devolution of enterprise risk management responsibility from the state to individual producers. Using a biophysical simulation model, the risk management benefits of federal crop insurance and supplemental irrigation are derived and compared to uninsured rainfed crop production in an expected utility framework. Federal crop insurance programs are inefficient at reducing producer exposure to weather-related production risk in humid regions, and the risk management benefits from supplemental irrigation are found to be scale and technology dependent. Environmental policies that regulate resource development will increase the investment cost of irrigation alternatives and reduce economic feasibility.

Data on owner and land characteristics are used to analyze factors affecting participation decisions in Delaware's agricultural lands preservation program, federal commodity programs, and federal conservation programs. A trivariate probit model estimates a set of random utility models of participation. Participation decisions at the state and federal levels are found to be driven by many of the same observed factors, but uncorrelated in unobserved characteristics. The important exceptions are that owners of small parcels under development pressure and with parcels of relatively low environmental quality tend to enroll in commodity programs rather than preservation. In part, the complex policy environment may therefore limit the effectiveness of programs seeking to preserve parcels with the highest environmental quality or facing the greatest development pressure.

Fracking is a controversial practice but is thriving in many areas. We combine a comprehensive data set on local bans and moratoria in the state of New York with local-level census data and spatial characteristics in a spatial econometric analysis of local fracking policies. Some factors, including location in the Utica shale, proportion of registered Democrats, and education level, increase the probability of restrictions on fracking. Extent of local land development, location in highly productive petroleum areas, and number of extant oil and gas wells are among factors that have a negative impact on the likelihood of a ban or moratorium.

While there is mixed evidence of the impact of food assistance programs on obesity, there is general agreement that the food-insecure are at higher risk of obesity and obesity-related diseases. Food assistance programs, originally designed to overcome a lack of available food, now need to confront a very different problem: how to provide for the food-insecure while encouraging healthy lifestyles. This paper examines the potential to address these competing needs using traditional economic policies (manipulating information or prices) versus policies engaging behavioral economics and psychology.

Agricultural production estimates have often differentiated and estimated different technologies within a sample of farms. The common approach is to use observable farm characteristics to split the sample into groups and subsequently estimate different functions for each group. Alternatively, unique technologies can be determined by econometric procedures such as latent class models. This paper compares the results of a latent class model with the use of a priori information to split the sample using dairy farm data. Latent class separation appears to be a superior method of separating heterogeneous technologies and suggests that technology differences are multifaceted.

It is now fashionable in many circles to advocate vegetarianism, and many activist groups are vocal in their aim to convert the human race to vegetarians. What would be the economic costs and benefits of a shift away from meat consumption? In this article we provide some partial answers to this question. In three separate analyses we show (i) that it is much more costly to produce energy and protein from animal-based sources than from some plant-based sources, (ii) that sizable demand shifts away from meat consumption would result in significantly lower corn prices and production, and (iii) that the average U.S. consumer places a higher value on having meat in his or her diet than having any other food group. This information should help move forward our understanding of the economics of vegetarianism and provide an objective stance from which to evaluate the claims being made by advocates of vegetarianism.

The effective design and implementation of interventions that reduce vulnerability and poverty require a solid understanding of underlying poverty dynamics and associated behavioral responses. Stochastic and dynamic benefit streams can make it difficult for the poor to learn the value of such interventions to them. We explore how dynamic field experiments can help (i) intended beneficiaries to learn and understand these complicated benefit streams, and (ii) researchers to better understand how the poor respond to risk when faced with nonlinear welfare dynamics. We discuss and analyze dynamic risk valuation experiments in Morocco, Peru, and Kenya.

Dutch coastal land markets are characterized by high amenity values but are threatened by potential coastal hazards, leading to high potential damage costs from flooding. Yet, Dutch residents generally perceive low or no flood risk. Using an agent-based land market model and Dutch survey data on risk perceptions and location preferences, this paper explores the patterns of land development and land rents produced by buyers with low, highly skewed risk perceptions. We find that, compared to representative agent and uniform risk perception models, the skewed risk perception distribution produces substantially more, high-valued development in risky coastal zones, potentially creating economically significant risks triggered by the current Dutch flood protection policy.

This paper analyzes the economics of two-tier tariff import quotas (TRQs) and implications of alternative trade liberalization scenarios. The Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture had tariffs replace nontariff barriers as the protective mechanism while quotas ensured minimum trade flows. Our framework isolates the effects of changes either in the second-tier tariff, and first-tier tariff, or the quota. We show how market conditions or relative policy instrument levels determine which tariff or quota affects trade and domestic and world prices. Whether or not exporting countries have been allocated export quotas and the procedures for the distribution of the rights to export and import also influences the efficiency of TRQs.

The off-farm labor participation and supply decisions of Massachusetts farm families were estimated in a model which allows for joint decisions. The hypothesis of joint off-farm participation decisions by operators and spouses was rejected. However, there was some evidence that the hours supplied by the farm operator was dependent upon the decision by the spouse to work off-farm. Farm operators were found to respond to both family and farm characteristics in making participation and supply decisions. Spouses respond to the characteristics of the farm and family in participation decisions while family characteristics determined hours worked by the spouse.

Although most global forest economic studies have found that warming is likely to increase forest supply, these studies have examined only the limited warming expected through 2100. This study extends the analysis out to 2250 to test much higher levels of warming to examine very long term effects. Future warming is predicted to steadily increase forest productivity, with global timber supply predicted to increase through 2250, even with warming up to 11 °C warming. However, natural forestland and biomass will shrink. This result suggests far future forests will not be able to hold the same stock of carbon they hold today.

In this study we use data envelopment analysis (DEA) and an extension of DEA called value efficiency analysis (VEA) to explore the “production” of quality of life within counties in the mid-Atlantic region and the extent to which production frontiers and efficiency differ between rural and urban counties. These methods allow us to identify counties that are inefficient in their quality of life production, and to rank (using DEA) those counties according to their distance from a performance standard established by other observed counties, or (using VEA) by a single unit designated as “most preferred.”