Replaced with revised version of paper 07/02/10.

This article quantifies the effect of the 2006 food-borne illness spinach outbreak on harvested acreage for the fresh spinach market. In September 2006, fresh spinach contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 caused hundreds of consumer illnesses across the U.S. and a few deaths. The outbreak was...

Many economists and others are interested in the phenomenon of rising alcohol content of wine and its potential causes. Has the alcohol content of wine risen—and if so, by how much, where, and when? What roles have been played by climate change and other environmental factors compared with...

In this paper, we generalize the rational addiction model to include three addictive goods: cigarettes, alcohol and coffee. We use a pseudo-panel data approach which has many advantages compared to aggregate and panel data. While cigarette and coffee demands fit well with the rational addiction...

We conducted a natural field experiment in an artisanal sit-down ice-cream shop in Italy to investigate whether consumer choices are affected by information regarding locally grown products. Two aspects of locally grown products are investigated: (i) quality due to terroir (i.e., quality with a...

When quality is not observable by prospective buyers, theory predicts that the quality of marketed goods will suffer, and the volume of trade will be depressed. Using data from more than 2,000 maize samples collected in four Kenyan provinces, we show that the presence of aflatoxin, an invisible...

To date there is limited knowledge on the role that post-harvest storage protectants, chemical or otherwise, play in a smallholder farmer’s decision to adopt of high-yielding improved maize varieties. This is a key issue because higher yielding varieties are often more susceptible to storage...