Showing 61 - 70 of 80 Items
US Household Demand for Organic Fruit
Date: 2017-08-31
Creator: Erik Nelson, John M Fitzgerald, Nathan Tefft, John L. Anderson
Access: Open access
- We estimate US household monthly elasticities of demand for some of the more popular organic fruits. To our knowledge, this is the first US-wide, multi-year analysis of price and income elasticities for various organic fruits. We calculate elasticities of demand for low-income, middle class, and rich income bracket households using three estimation techniques: two econometric methods and one machine learning method (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO)). Demand estimates are based on Nielsen scanner data from approximately 60,000 households collected from 2011 to 2013. Generally, we find that own-price conditional and unconditional elasticities of demand for organic fruits are negative. Unconditional elasticity magnitudes tend to be largest in the representative middle-class household. Income elasticities of demand measurements are inconsistent and often statistically insignificant. This finding is consistent with the survey literature finding that many consumers buy organic food for mostly moral or ethical reasons. We run two policy experiments: a 10% subsidy of organic fruits, and a 10% tax on conventional fruits. Our hypothetical policies engender a stronger reaction among the general public than habitual buyers of organic fruit; unconditional purchase and expenditure elasticities are generally larger than conditional purchase and expenditure elasticities. Finally, we find that elasticities measured with the LASSO technique are not radically different than those measured with econometric methods. The most noticeable difference between the two analytical techniques is that LASSO is more likely to find price and income elasticities of demand that indistinguishable from zero, both substantively and statistically.
On Kindleberger and Hegemony: From Berlin to M.I.T. and Back
Date: 2013-09-29
Creator: Stephen Meardon
Access: Open access
- The most notable idea of Charles P. Kindleberger’s later career is the value of a single country acting as stabilizer of an international economy prone to instability. It runs through his widely read books, The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (1973), Manias, Crises, and Panics (1978), A Financial History of Western Europe (1984), and kindred works. “Hegemonic stability,” the idea is called in the literature it inspired. This essay traces Kindleberger’s attachment to the idea back to his tenure as chief of the State Department’s Division of German and Austrian Economic Affairs from 1945 to 1947 and adviser to the European Recovery Program from 1947 to 1948. In both capacities Kindleberger observed and participated indirectly in the 1948 monetary reform in Western Germany. In the 1990s, during his octogenary decade, he revisited the German monetary reform with a fellow participant, economist, and longtime friend, F. Taylor Ostrander. Their collaborative essay marked Kindleberger’s effort to reclaim hegemonic stability theory from the scholars who developed it following his works of the 1970s and 1980s.
The Effects of Exchange Rates on Employment in Canada
Date: 2013-06-05
Creator: Yao Tang, Haifang Huang, Ke Pang
Access: Open access
- Under the flexible exchange rate regime, the Canadian economy is constantly affected by fluctuations in exchange rates. This paper focuses on employment in Canada. We find that appreciations of the Canadian dollar have significant effects on employment in manufacturing industries; such effects are mostly associated with the export-weighted exchange rate and not the import-weighted exchange rate. The export-weighted exchange rate elasticity of employment is -0.52. However, we also find that exchange rate fluctuations have little impact on Canada’s nonmanufacturing employment. Because the manufacturing sector accounts for only about 10% of the employment in Canada, the overall employment effect of exchange rates is small. In addition, we assess the potential employment impact of a boom in the global commodity market, which often leads to appreciations of the Canadian dollar. We find that a 12.21% increase in commodity prices (one standard deviation in the 1994-2007 data) reduces Canada’s manufacturing employment by 0.98%, less than 0.1% of the total industrial employment.
Efficiency of incentives to jointly increase carbon sequestration and species conservation on a landscape
Date: 2008-07-15
Creator: Erik Nelson, Stephen Polasky, David J. Lewis, Andrew J. Plantinga, Eric, Lonsdorf, Denis White, David Bael, Joshua J. Lawler
Access: Open access
- We develop an integrated model to predict private land-use decisions in response to policy incentives designed to increase the provision of carbon sequestration and species conservation across heterogeneous landscapes. Using data from the Willamette Basin, Oregon, we compare the provision of carbon sequestration and species conservation under five simple policies that offer payments for conservation. We evaluate policy performance compared with the maximum feasible combinations of carbon sequestration and species conservation on the landscape for various conservation budgets. None of the conservation payment policies produce increases in carbon sequestration and species conservation that approach the maximum potential gains on the landscape. Our results show that policies aimed at increasing the provision of carbon sequestration do not necessarily increase species conservation and that highly targeted policies do not necessarily do as well as more general policies. © 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA.
Climate change and health costs of air emissions from biofuels and gasoline
Date: 2009-02-10
Creator: Jason Hill, Stephen Polasky, Erik Nelson, David Tilman, Hong, Huo, Lindsay Ludwig, James Neumann, Haochi Zheng, Diego Bonta
Access: Open access
- Environmental impacts of energy use can impose large costs on society. We quantify and monetize the life-cycle climate-change and health effects of greenhouse gas (GHG) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) emissions from gasoline, corn ethanol, and cellulosic ethanol. For each billion ethanol-equivalent gallons of fuel produced and combusted in the US, the combined climate-change and health costs are $469 million for gasoline, $472-952 million for corn ethanol depending on biorefinery heat source (natural gas, corn stover, or coal) and technology, but only $123-208 million for cellulosic ethanol depending on feedstock (prairie biomass, Miscanthus, corn stover, or switchgrass). Moreover, a geographically explicit life-cycle analysis that tracks PM2.5 emissions and exposure relative to U.S. population shows regional shifts in health costs dependent on fuel production systems. Because cellulosic ethanol can offer health benefits from PM2.5 reduction that are of comparable importance to its climate-change benefits from GHG reduction, a shift from gasoline to cellulosic ethanol has greater advantages than previously recognized. These advantages are critically dependent on the source of land used to produce biomass for biofuels, on the magnitude of any indirect land use that may result, and on other as yet unmeasured environmental impacts of biofuels. © 2009 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA.
New Institutional Economics: Political Institutions and Divergent Development in Costa Rica and Honduras
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Maynor Alberto Loaisiga Bojorge
Access: Open access
- For most of their histories, Costa Rica and Honduras were primarily agricultural societies with little economic diversification. However, around 1990, after the implementation of Washington Consensus reforms, the economies of both nations began to diverge. Costa Rica’s economy rapidly expanded for the following 30 years, while Honduras remained stagnant. Through a New Institutional Economics approach, I argue that institutional differences between Costa Rica and Honduras are responsible for the impressive economic growth Costa Rica has been able to achieve in the past few decades. Specifically, early political developments in Costa Rica have deeply imbedded relatively egalitarian values into the population, helping shape formal and informal inclusive political institutions. Meanwhile, Honduras experienced the development of extractive political institutions, as political and economic power was heavily concentrated in the hands of a select few. These political institutions were crucial during the implementation stages of Washington Consensus reforms, as strong and inclusive political institutions attracted Foreign Direct Investment that helped propel the Costa Rican economy and materialize its position as an outlier in the region. In contrast, lack of institutional guarantees discouraged foreign investors from investing money into the Honduran economy. Through a deep dive into the political histories of both nations, from European discovery to modernity, I conclude that the political institutions of these Central American nations have determined their economic growth paths.
Blockholders and Their Effect on Project Value: An Empirical Approach of Understanding Ownership Concentration and Firm Value Using an Event Study Framework
Date: 2017-05-01
Creator: Xuanming Guo
Access: Open access
- This study uses an event study framework to find the relationship between ownership concentration and project value. I find that project value first increases with ownership concentration when block size, the percentage ownership of the largest blockholder, is smaller than 10%, then declines with ownership concentration when block size gets larger, and finally rises again when block size exceeds 30%. However, my research only suggests an ambiguous relationship between ownership concentration and firm value. Additionally, ownership concentration seems to affect both the timing of market responses and the market’s interpretation of large investment projects.
Investigating the Effects of Student Debt on Career Outcomes: An Empirical Approach
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Gideon Moore
Access: Open access
- High student debt has been hypothesized to affect career choice, causing students to desire stable, high paying jobs. To test this hypothesis, I rely on plausibly exogenous variation in debt due to a federal policy shift. In the summer of 2007, the Higher Education Reconciliation Act (or HERA) expanded the cap for federally subsidized student loans. I examine how variation in debt affects career choice and eventual salary of students using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Child and Young Adult Cohort of students who were of college age during the implementation of the policy. I find that student debt has no impact on salary two years after graduation; however, it does seem to shift students’ career choices, leading some to avoid careers in public service industries such as teaching and social work.
Implementing the optimal provision of ecosystem services
Date: 2014-04-29
Creator: Stephen Polasky, David J. Lewis, Andrew J. Plantinga, Erik Nelson
Access: Open access
- Many ecosystem services are public goods whose provision depends on the spatial pattern of land use. The pattern of land use is often determined by the decisions of multiple private landowners. Increasing the provision of ecosystem services, though beneficial for society as a whole, may be costly to private landowners. A regulator interested in providing incentives to landowners for increased provision of ecosystem services often lacks complete information on landowners' costs. The combination of spatially dependent benefits and asymmetric cost information means that the optimal provision of ecosystem services cannot be achieved using standard regulatory or payment for ecosystem services approaches. Here we show that an auction that sets payments between landowners and the regulator for the increased value of ecosystem services with conservation provides incentives for landowners to truthfully reveal cost information, and allows the regulator to implement the optimal provision of ecosystem services, even in the case with spatially dependent benefits and asymmetric information.
Commercial plant production and consumption still follow the latitudinal gradient in species diversity despite economic globalization
Date: 2016-10-01
Creator: Erik J. Nelson, Matthew R. Helmus, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Stephen Polasky, Jesse R., Lasky, Amy E. Zanne, William D. Pearse, Nathan J.B. Kraft, Daniela A. Miteva
Access: Open access
- Increasing trade between countries and gains in income have given consumers around the world access to a richer and more diverse set of commercial plant products (i.e., foods and fibers produced by farmers). According to the economic theory of comparative advantage, countries open to trade will be able to consume more-in termsof volume and diversity-if they concentrate production on commodities that they can most cost-effectively produce, while importing goods that are expensive to produce, relative to other countries. Here, we performa global analysis of traded commercial plant products and find little evidence that increasing globalization has incentivized agricultural specialization. Instead, a country's plant production and consumption patterns are still largely determined by local evolutionary legacies of plant diversification. Because tropical countries harbor a greater diversity of lineages across the tree of life than temperate countries, tropical countries produce and consume a greater diversity of plant products than do temperate countries. In contrast, the richer and more economically advanced temperate countries have the capacity to produce and consume more plant species than the generally poorer tropical countries, yet this collection of plant species is drawn from fewer branches on the tree of life. Why have countries not increasingly specialized in plant production despite the theoretical financial incentive to do so? Potential explanations include the persistence of domestic agricultural subsidies that distort production decisions, cultural preferences for diverse local food production, and that diverse food production protects rural households in developing countries from food price shocks. Less specialized production patterns will make crop systems more resilient to zonal climatic and social perturbations,but this may come at the expense of global crop production efficiency, an important step in making the transition to a hotter and more crowded world.