In 2003, the Nebraska Legislature enacted the Livestock Friendly County designation program to promote the livestock industry in the state. Forty-nine of the state’s 93 counties received the designation at staggered years. Our paper estimates the causal effect of the program on the state’s cattle industry using a fixed effect difference-in-difference model that accounts for self-selection and staggered designation. Results indicate that the program does not appear to have a statewide effect on livestock expansion, but it is effective in some crop reporting districts. We offer some hypotheses on why this may be the case and draw some policy implications.

Since 2017, the Japanese government has been phasing out the use of non-native bumblebees as greenhouse tomato pollinators due to their ecological risks. We used an online questionnaire to investigate whether pollination methods affect consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for tomatoes. We found that consumers valued the use of non-native bumblebees more than hormonal treatment and native more than non-native bees. Moreover, we found that informing consumers of the ecological risks increased WTP for native bumblebees and hormonal treatment. These results suggest that pollination method labeling may help protect ecosystems from the threat of non-native species.

Increased credit availability facilitates land acquisition, but higher land values also hinder it. We investigate the impact of credit availability on land values, after regulatory changes in the lending system. We build an index of increased credit availability using Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation data. County-level panel fixed effects estimations are performed controlling for land value determinants, credit availability, and county-level macroeconomic factors. We find that estimating the effects of credit availability separately masks its total effect. Results show a 0.1 change in the index for increased credit availability is associated with 1.64–1.96% increase in land values.

This study explores the effects of consumers’ beliefs about labels on chicken. We elicit beliefs associated with seven different labels. By varying the presence/absence of labels in a choice experiment, we are able to determine the effects of labels on consumer choices and decompose the value of labels into beliefs and base utility. Health perceptions have the largest positive effect, and impacts of animal welfare vary by information treatment. We explore the convergent validity of our approach by comparing individual’s beliefs to responses to a best-worst scaling question, which were weakly correlated, suggesting the two approaches are measuring different constructs.

The dairy industries in California, Idaho, and New Mexico expanded rapidly during the early 2000s. This study focuses on the expansion effects on milk-to-hay price responsiveness. Dairy industry expansion makes hay markets tighter, with less available marketable supply in most periods. The empirical models account for the expansion effect as well as those from hay exports and low stocks-to-use ratios that also cause changes in hay market demand characteristics. The results show that hay-to-milk price responsiveness increased after dairy expansion in all analyzed states. Low stocks-to-use and high exports dampened the responsiveness, but were not statistically significant for all analyzed states.

This article investigates the short- and long-term costs of an extreme weather event on retail food prices and consumer expenditures. We utilize the 2011 severe peanut drought as a quasi-natural experiment and find that retail peanut butter prices increased 21.3% as a result of the drought-driven shock in farm peanut production and prices. Moreover, we identify long-term costs due to positive asymmetric price transmission as retail peanut butter prices returned to pre-shock levels much more slowly and remained on average 6.2% higher for 4 years after farm peanut prices returned to pre-shock levels. For consumers, the drought increased peanut butter costs, and the persistence of higher prices in peanut butter led to long-term consumer costs. Peanut butter expenditure on average increased by 4.8% post-shock, with lower-income households increasing expenditures even more. A simple calculation estimates that higher peanut butter prices inflicted a cost of $1.08 billion during the shock, and sticky post-shock peanut butter prices imposed a cost of $628 million to U.S. consumers.

We adopt an EASI model to estimate demand for omega-3, organic, cage-free, and conventional eggs in the United States. Our empirical framework accounts for demand inter-dependencies among these egg types, while allowing for unrestricted Engel curves, unobserved consumer heterogeneity, and a broader product and geographic coverage. We further address endogeneity of prices and expenditures and left-censoring induced by disaggregate data. Our results indicate that the demand for organic and cage-free eggs is price-elastic, while the demand for omega-3 and conventional eggs is price-inelastic. Additionally, we establish strong substitutability relationships between the eggs. Finally, we measure consumer welfare consequences of rising domestic egg prices brought by Japan’s egg import tariff reductions.