Abstract This study examines the impact of smartphone adoption on livestock trading in pastoral China. We develop a bargaining and search model with two mechanisms: information discovery, which reduces herders’ search costs, and information posting, which expands market access. Using household survey data, we find that smartphone adoption increases selling prices. Mechanism analysis shows that traditional phone functions improve information access, while smartphone-specific features, especially information posting, enhance bargaining power by expanding selling channels and trader access. These findings demonstrate that digital technologies affect market outcomes not only through improved information access but also by reshaping bargaining structures and market participation.
Abstract Agent-based models are valuable tools for agricultural policy evaluation. They can represent the heterogeneity of farmers and farmer interactions and are especially useful when behavioural and social factors are integrated to represent farmers’ decision-making. We assess the potential of agent-based models by conducting a review of forty-eight agent-based models developed for European agriculture and a survey with twenty-six modellers and twenty-four policy stakeholders. We find that while agent-based models provide nuanced representations of farmers’ decision-making processes, there is a gap between what is currently implemented in models, what modellers consider important and what policymakers expect.
Time preferences shape decisions about resource use, investment and sustainability, yet evidence on how they are measured in rural field settings remains fragmented. This systematic literature review covers 67 studies eliciting time preferences among rural populations, focusing on farmers and fishers. We map the theoretical models used, compare elicitation methods and experimental designs, and synthesise reported patterns. The review documents substantial heterogeneity in how time preferences are conceptualised and measured, and highlights recurring methodological and reporting challenges that limit comparability across contexts. For more reliable, replicable and policy-relevant research, we propose a structured reporting guide.
Using matched employer-employee data, we examine how workforce knowledge characteristics relate to firm productivity in the equine sector. Using panel data on Swedish equine firms from 2010 to 2022, we construct measures of workforce composition, including occupation-specific education, accumulated work experience and knowledge diversity. The results show that access to occupation-specific human capital is positively associated with productivity, with substantial heterogeneity across firms. Knowledge effects are stronger among firms specializing in horse racing than in breeding, highlighting differences in the role of human capital across production orientations. The findings have implications for policy and firms' investment decisions.
We examine how pesticide expenditure relates to the probability distribution of yield and revenue per hectare in apple production in northern Italy. Using a flexible moment-based approach, we find that pesticide expenditure is negatively associated with downside risk in yield and revenue, whereas late frosts are positively associated with downside risk in yield. Sensitivity analyses show that mean-equation estimates are robust to unobserved confounders, while negative semi-variance models are less robust overall. Only the pesticide-expected outcome relationship appears plausibly causal. Therefore, conclusions about pesticides as risk-increasing or risk-decreasing inputs should be made with caution.
The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) seeks to reduce deforestation by restricting market access to deforestation-embodied soy products in the EU market. The main concern is that such restrictions could shift the soy trade to unregulated non-EU markets. To shed light on this issue, we employ a gravity model, treating the EUDR compliance costs as additional trade costs for exports to the EU. We find that stricter compliance costs reallocate soy exports from South America toward non-EU markets, mainly China, divert the EU imports toward North America, and increase the prices of soy faced by EU soy users. Under the counterfactual scenario in which South America does not comply with the regulation, EU consumers face even larger price increases, while South American countries experience minimal terms-of-trade losses. Our analysis suggests that trade reallocation to an unregulated market could potentially dilute the impact of the EUDR, making it less effective in directly reducing deforestation linked to soy production.
We examine the economic impact of regulating new genomic techniques on investment decisions in the EU. Using a real options model, we compare five major regulatory options (nine including sub-options) with the status quo and analyse their effects on plant breeders' investments. Using the current authorization process for genetically modified organisms for NGTs presents a high investment barrier for companies. The findings indicate that all alternative five options offer opportunities to reduce investment hurdles, depending on the design of the authorization process. Our model and its calibration serve as an example for further advancing the application of real options for regulatory policy analysis.
Conservation auctions are designed to allocate payments for environmental services to voluntary farmers. The auctioneer may announce either the maximum number of contracts (target-constrained auction) or, more commonly, the total budget available (budget-constrained auction). Building on previous work that compared these two formats, we introduce a new double-constraint auction, where both constraints-set at the same levels as in the benchmarks-are simultaneously disclosed to participants. Using the same experimental methodology, we assess performance consistent with a generic policy objective: maximizing environmental benefits while minimizing expenditures. On average, the double-constraint auction outperforms both target- and budget-constrained formats.
Agribusinesses contribute 40-70 percent of the total value added in the food value chain of developing countries; however, they remain under-researched. We investigate whether firm-level innovation improves economic performance using World Bank Enterprise Surveys for El Salvador. We extend the Cr & eacute;pon-Duguet-Mairesse model with a selectivity-corrected stochastic frontier and a metafrontier framework. We find that innovation increases potential total sales and reduces the technology gap, but does not improve technical efficiency. This suggests that, without complementary managerial and institutional support-particularly in contexts where insecurity imposes high operational and opportunity costs-the benefits of innovation do not necessarily lead to productivity gains.
This paper examines consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for attributes of organic chicken meat in the UK, a product experiencing increasing popularity both domestically and internationally. We combine stated preference (SP) data from a discrete choice experiment with revealed preference (RP) data from supermarket scanner transactions in a joint estimation framework. This approach mitigates common limitations of analysing SP and RP data separately, such as hypothetical bias in SP and multicollinearity in RP. Using a heteroskedastic conditional logit model with interaction terms, we estimate WTP values that account for both preference heterogeneity and scale differences across datasets. Results indicate that consumers assign a substantial premium to the organic attribute, with joint estimates approximately 9 per cent higher than those based solely on SP data and more than double those from RP. These findings underscore the importance of integrating SP and RP data to inform evidence-based food policy.
We investigate whether Russia's change in trade policy from increasingly WTO compliant, pre-WTO accession policy to being restrictive, discretionary and WTO non-compliant has changed price volatility on the domestic market. DCC-MGARCH model results suggest doubling of conditional volatility and volatility correlation between pork producer prices along Russia's pork supply chain. A volatility regime switch is confirmed by the regime switching dynamic correlations model. Our findings show that contrary to their objective, discretionary trade restrictions may increase price volatility in the domestic market. Trade restrictions need to be redesigned such that rule-based, WTO-conform trade policies are implemented instead.
Farmers manage each type of pesticide differently, given the varying risks they address. As both damage-abating and polluting inputs, we have incorporated their negative impacts into a non-parametric framework to estimate the technical inefficiency of different pesticides and environmental inefficiency of Dutch arable farms from 2011 to 2021. Results suggest that farmers are more efficient in using insecticides rather than fungicides, herbicides and other pesticides, and have a higher potential to reduce negative pesticide impacts on aquatic organisms compared to soil organisms. However, even with full efficiency, the vast majority of farmers would not meet acceptable pesticide impact levels that are seen as sustainable in the long run.
Biofuel mandates can impact the environment in multiple ways that may be positive or negative, including affecting life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by displacing fossil fuels, affecting soil carbon stocks due to accompanying land use change, and water quality due to changes in fertilizer requirements and the mix of crops used as feedstocks. To achieve desired environmental outcomes in the presence of a biofuel mandate, additional policy instruments must be adopted to supplement the mandate. We develop an integrated and spatially explicit ecosystem-economic modeling framework to analyze the cost-effectiveness of alternative policies to achieve desired targets for GHG emissions reduction from the agricultural and fuel sectors in the USA and nitrate leaching reduction in the Gulf of Mexico below the levels that would be achieved by a corn ethanol and/or a cellulosic ethanol mandate in the USA. We find that while a corn ethanol mandate lowers GHG emissions, it increases nitrate leaching due to the expansion of corn production; a cellulosic ethanol mandate lowers both GHG emissions and nitrate leaching relative to a corn ethanol mandate, but the additional carbon and nitrate prices are needed to achieve anticipated GHG reduction and nitrate reduction targets. We also find that accompanying a biofuel mandate with a GHG reduction target alone leads to substantial nitrate reduction co-benefits, but a nitrate reduction target alone is less effective in reducing GHG emissions. Combining a GHG standard with a nitrate standard can achieve GHG and nitrate reduction targets at lower carbon and nitrate prices as compared to implementing each of these policies independently. Our findings show that disregarding policy co-benefits can overestimate the GHG and nitrate prices needed to achieve policy targets and higher policy costs.
The rise of antibiotic resistance in plant agriculture, combined with limited disease management options and potential antibiotic bans, complicates growers' disease management decision-making. We develop a dynamic model of optimal antibiotic use under uncertainty about ban enforcement in the case of apple fire blight. We find that proactive growers who adjust to anticipated bans overexploit antibiotic efficacy and gain benefits over business-as-usual growers. However, if a government fails to enforce an announced ban, these proactive growers incur losses. The magnitude of these losses is nonlinear with respect to the value of the crop in question. We generate loss estimates for a range of apple crop values and show that regulatory uncertainty can have negative, neutral, or positive unintended impacts on growers.
Decision Support Systems (DSS) with embedded best management practices help reduce pesticide use. However, costly experimentation is necessary to learn about the quality of their data processing and recommendation models. We study farmers’ choices to try such a DSS. Due to order effects, learning can be inefficient and stop after inadequate recommendations, leading to crop losses. Subsidizing crop insurance conditional on DSS use is a cost-effective policy to foster experimentation. A 4-year living lab on-farm experiment involving French wine cooperatives, an insurer, and researchers supports our theoretical results on learning dynamics and provides additional insight into information requirements for subsidized green insurance.
This special issue of the European Review of Agricultural Economics honors the life and scholarship of Professor Gudbrand Lien (1966–2024), whose pioneering work bridged methodological rigor and practical relevance in agricultural and business economics. The collected papers reflect his enduring influence across productivity measurement, efficiency analysis and risk and sustainability research. Contributions span methodological innovations in stochastic frontier modeling, analyses of spatial and technological heterogeneity, entrepreneurship and diversification and environmental efficiency under climate change. Together, they illustrate Lien’s intellectual legacy—integrating theory, empirics and policy to advance a pluralistic, context-sensitive understanding of agricultural productivity and sustainable rural development.
This special issue focuses on how information influences the transition to sustainable and resilient agri-food systems. The contributions analyse farmers' and consumers' responses to different information strategies, including behavioural framings, advisory services, digital tools, data-sharing rules and communication around meat taxes. While the findings show that information alone may not always have a strong impact, its effectiveness can often be improved when combined with incentives. Together, the articles advance understanding of how information economics can inform policies and interventions to close sustainability and resilience gaps in agri-food systems.
Understanding how seasonal weather anomalies brought by climate change impact on agricultural productivity is fundamental to food security. To allow proper site- and season-specific policy responses, micro-level assessments are needed. This study uses a panel data econometric approach to assess the impact of weather anomalies on Italian farms' total factor productivity (TFP) over the period 2008-2020 using micro-level data. Estimates point to a complex TFP-weather relationship. Results confirm that seasonal weather anomalies have a negative effect on agricultural performance of different farm typologies. Effects tend to be larger the larger the weather anomalies.
This study examines the impact of agri-environmental measures on crop and livestock costs, labour inputs and income growth, using FADN farm-level data for the years 2006 and 2013, covering the 2007-2013 programming period in 22 EU countries. Employing a difference-in-differences model combined with coarsened exact matching, the results show that while some specific production costs rise on subsidized farms, these increases differ by region. Income growth and labour inputs are consistently higher across all regions. In particular, crop protection costs rise significantly in Western countries, while labour inputs do so in Southern and Eastern countries and at the EU level. Positive and significant effects on productivity outcomes are observed in the EU and Western EU countries.
Although organic labels inform consumers about food production, many incorrectly infer that organic foods contain fewer calories than regular foods, a phenomenon known as the organic health halo effect. This study examines the influence of mood, restrained eating, and food healthiness perceptions on the prevalence of the organic health halo effect. Results revealed that both restrained and unrestrained eaters perceive organic foods as healthier and less caloric. Although organic and regular foods were identical in calories, calorie misperception persisted across mood conditions and restrained eating status. However, positive and negative moods decreased the organic health halo effect among unrestrained eaters.
