Agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions but has largely been exempt from stringent climate change mitigation policies, often due to concerns about resistance from the sector. With Denmark introducing the world’s first CO2-equivalent (CO2e) tax on agricultural emissions, this paper provides representative evidence of farmers’ beliefs about its impacts and examines whether providing expert-predicted impacts can causally influence these beliefs and acceptance of the tax. Using a randomized survey experiment with 981 Danish farmers, we find a widespread overestimation of the tax’s impacts on production, employment, and land value, with 94–97 % of farmers expecting the impacts to be up to three times larger than expert-predicted estimates. Providing an expert-predicted impact reduces these perception gaps, with effects varying according to the tax’s stringency, size of belief gaps, and farm characteristics such as size and type. However, our results also indicate that, in some cases, belief updating may be muted or even contrary to the information provided, consistent with behavioral theories beyond the Bayesian framework. We also find that the belief revisions can translate into greater acceptance of the tax, although these effects vary with tax stringency, initial belief gaps, and farm characteristics. Our findings suggest that designing acceptable climate policies for agriculture may require not only expert information but also targeted communication and complementary measures that account for farmers’ diverse characteristics and perceptions.
Growth in trade of perishable foods has significantly increased global access to fresh foods, but important trade-offs arising from perishability are not captured in standard trade models. In this paper, we develop a model of age-related product freshness that places importer logistics choices at the center of the analysis. The model highlights order size and order frequency as key trade margins, alongside the nonlinear pricing that arises from scale economies in trade. Importers determine freshness through their order-size and order-frequency choices, balancing a cost–quality trade-off. This has important implications for understanding the quality effects of growth, innovation, and trade policy. For instance, while innovations in cold-chain technology directly improve freshness, their overall effect depends on importers’ logistics choices, which also influence the carbon emissions associated with perishable trade. Fresh seafood is one of the most successful categories in the global expansion of fresh food trade. Using transaction-level data on Norwegian seafood exports from the world’s largest exporter of fresh seafood, we document that order-size discounts are important. We use the model to evaluate how reductions in perishability and protective tariffs affect trade outcomes and product freshness.
Understanding household food behavior is key to anticipating the welfare effects of economic shocks, particularly in urban areas where COVID-19 disrupted livelihoods and food access. While a growing body of literature documents the pandemic’s effects on food security, few studies explicitly integrate households’ pre-pandemic sensitivity to income and price changes. This study examines household food demand in Dakar, Senegal, and evaluates the simulated effects of COVID-19-related income contractions and food price increases on food security and diet quality. Using statistically matched household surveys, we estimate a censored Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System model with subgroup-specific elasticities and develop a microsimulation model incorporating a heterogeneous Engel transmission channel across six counterfactual scenarios combining three income levels with two food price scenarios. The estimates reveal that households are highly sensitive to price shocks, particularly for staples and animal-source foods, while income shocks transmit partially to food expenditure, with subgroup-specific transmission. Simulated shocks reduce average caloric intake by 17%–36% and lower the food security rate from 52% at baseline to between 40% and 22% depending on the scenario, with statistically significant heterogeneity across sociodemographic groups. The Resilient Diet Deprivation index further reveals a simultaneous deterioration in diet quality through wider and deeper food group deficits, with the contribution of staples and animal-source foods to dietary deprivation rising across all scenarios. These findings underscore the importance of price stabilization policies, nutrition-sensitive interventions, and targeted social protection to strengthen household resilience in urban West Africa.
