I was excited to see The Economist ran an article on my paper with Laurent Muller, Anne Lacroix, and Bernard Ruffieux, which appeared in the Economic Journal. In typical Economist fashion, they didn't mention us by name, but here's their summary of our findings:
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Paarlberg on Farm Policy
Yesterday, I posted on a paper I wrote critiquing some of the proposals of the food movement. As such, its probably only fair that I share a paper sent to me by a reader. It was written by Don Paarlberg in 1987 and takes issue with farm policy from the Depression up to that date. I found the history fascinating; the paper is short and well worth a read. By the way, Don was a Professor of Agricultural Economics at Purdue and was a former Assistant Secretary of Agriculture.
Here's an excerpt that shows some of the challenges with trying to manage agricultural prices and supplies.
Labeling Food Processes: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
That's the title of an interesting new article in the journal Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy by Kent Messer, Marco Costanigro, and Harry Kaiser. Here's the abstract:
The Effects of Farm and Food Policy on Obesity in the United States
That's the title of a new book by Julian Alston and Abigail Okrent. Right now it's only available as an ebook, but the hard copy should be out soon. Here's the publisher's description.
I had the pleasure of seeing a pre-release copy of the book and provided the following blurb:
How Animal Welfare Laws Affect Egg Prices and Production
Like California, at least five other states (Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington) have passed laws that will eventually limit the use of so-called battery cages in egg production, and retailers like Walmart and McDonald's have made pledges to do the same. Because this move started earlier in California, and due to the size of that state and the volume of egg production there, California represent a good case to analyze the effects of these laws.
While I've written on this topic a number of times here on the blog (e.g., here), Conner Mullally and I have finally pulled together a revision of our earlier work that is much more comprehensive and hopefully informative.
One question that I haven't seen much addressed is: what happened to egg production in California as result of their animal welfare laws (these laws include passage of Proposition 2 by voters in 2008 which banned the production of eggs from battery cages and the subsequent passage of state law AB 1437 which banned the sale of eggs from battery cages - both were ultimately enforced on January 1, 2015 via California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) rules)?
Before all of this went down, Dan Sumner and other researchers at UC Davis warned that passage of Prop 2 could lead to an exodus of California egg producers and lead California retailers to increase imports of eggs from other states (that's one reason state law AB 1437 came into being - to try to prevent this outcome). The chart below shows our analysis of the number of egg laying hens in California, which generally confirms the UC Davis researcher's conjecture made back in 2008.
We estimate that:
Here is a graph of egg imports into the state, which Conner obtained via a FOIA request from CDFA, along with egg production in the state.
In addition to these production impacts, we were also interested in the impacts on prices paid by food consumers. To address this issue, we obtained retail scanner data from Nielsen.
Here is a graph of the actual (or observed) price of eggs in California compared to our prediction of what egg prices would have been had the new animal welfare laws not gone into place.