Food insecurity and unemployment among immigrants in the United States onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajae.70071 A new article in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

Accounting for animal health in efficiency analysis: An application to Swedish dairy onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajae.70... A new article in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

Aggregate pass-through remains stable (0.086), but its composition shifts. Pass-through has declined among import-dependent firms and risen among less import-dependent firms, indicating evolving inflation channels and growing pressure from strategic pricing.

Markup responses differ by type. Large, import-dependent firms compress margins when import prices rise, while many non-large or less import-dependent firms raise markups in response to the imported crop price increase, amplifying inflation.

We find that market power is substantial (average markup is about 1.21) and increasingly polarized; median markups are stable while the upper tail rises. High-markup firms are pulling away, reshaping pricing power within the food industry.

We draw on firm financial data covering 10,911 South Korean food manufacturers from 2000–2021, accounting for 81% of sector sales. Korea is a classic small open economy: heavily reliant on grain imports with negligible market power in global crop markets.

To take this to data, we combine a Leontief production structure with firm-level markup estimation. Firm-level pass-through elasticity becomes a function of estimated markup responses, firm markups, material shares, and import-crop dependence.

We build a theory that shows cost pass-through depends on (i) reliance on imported crops and (ii) demand curvature under imperfect competition. Strategic interaction implies an indirect channel: firms not exposed to the cost shock can still raise markups.

In a small open economy, import crop prices are taken as given. However, the resulting inflation manifests in very different patterns across sectors and firm types, because firms change markups strategically when costs (theirs or rivals’) move.

Trade tensions and supply disruptions keep global crop prices highly uncertain. In import-dependent small open economies, the key question is: how much of an agricultural import price shock shows up as food inflation, and through which pricing channel?

Food inflation pass‐through from agricultural imports in a small open economy This paper develops a new framework for quantifying cost pass-through in a small open economy by estimating firm-level markup responses to agricultural import price shocks. We show theoretically that...

New AJAE article:

“Food Inflation Pass-through from Agricultural Imports in a Small Open Economy,”

by Minseong Kang and Seungki Lee,
doi.org/10.1002/ajae...

Our study contributes by establishing land-grant railroads as an exogenous instrument for public lands and by providing a framework to evaluate the welfare effects of proposed land exchanges and other changes in land ownership or management.

Welfare calculations indicate that the annual urban household willingness to pay for a one percent increase in public land ranges from $80.58 to $130.29.

Using GIS and Census data for U.S. urban areas and instruments rooted in 19th-century land disposal policies, we estimate how federal and state public lands contribute to urban quality of life.

Public lands remain understudied in the urban quality-of-life literature. Prior studies use geographic units that are too small to capture relevant land, define public lands too narrowly, and rarely address endogeneity when quasi-experimental designs are infeasible.

Federal and state-owned public lands occupy a significant share of many U.S. urban regions and contribute to two highly-valued nontradable goods: viewscapes and outdoor recreational opportunities.

New AJAE paper:

"Public lands and urban quality of life,"

by Sherzod B. Akhundjanov, Paul M. Jakus,
doi.org/10.1002/ajae...

The findings highlight the need for a holistic and systemic view of policy.

Ecologically relevant impacts are documented: biogas promotion incentivizes maize-based crop rotations, thereby reducing local crop diversity and, most likely, biodiversity. Ecological compensation areas, compulsory for wind turbines, cannot counteract the trend.

In sum, the authors attribute 9% of the observed increase in land prices over the study period to renewable energy expansion.

Indirect land price channels emerge from an altered farm structure, e.g., number and size of farms, through biogas promotion – an effect underestimated in previous studies.

Land transaction and land-use data from Brandenburg, 2005–2018, reveal direct and indirect effects on farmland prices: in proximity to wind turbines and biogas plants, higher economic rents are possible and translate into a higher willingness to pay.

By imposing a logical temporal structure, we exploit regional and temporal variation in renewable energy expansion. The SEM offers causal channels for direct and indirect impacts.

The authors convey a systemic policy evaluation approach that explicitly distinguishes direct and indirect policy impact channels using a theory-informed structural equation model (SEM).

Germany’s Renewable Energy Sources Act (REA) substantially fostered biogas and wind expansion but fixed feed-in tariffs capitalize into farmland values, and have ecologically relevant impacts on the farmland mosaic of fields in a region.

Uncovering renewable energy policy impact channels on land values, the local farm structure, and farmland heterogeneity Germany's Renewable Energy Sources Act (REA), enacted in 2000 and subsequently amended, subsidized national renewable energy production with fixed feed-in tariffs for renewable energy sources (RE) fr...

New AJAE paper:

"Uncovering renewable energy policy impact channels on land values, the local farm structure, and farmland heterogeneity,"

by Lars Isenhardt, Stefan Seifert, Saskia Wolff, Tobia Lakes, Marten Graubner, Axel Werwatz, Silke Hüttel,

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

The results highlight the importance of crop-specific policy design and institutional arrangements when reforming seed systems in developing countries transitioning from state-managed to market-led systems.

The crop-specific effects likely reflect differences in reproductive biology and market incentives. Hybrid maize generates recurring demand and stronger commercial incentives than self-pollinating wheat.

In contrast, we find no statistically significant effects of DSM on wheat seed purchases or wheat yields.

These changes translated into an 18 percent increase in maize yields, suggesting that institutional reforms in seed markets can generate substantial productivity gains.