Proponents of the U.S. mandatory country-of-origin labeling (MCOOL) law have argued that consumers prefer domestic meat and value labels confirming domestic origin. Following legislation enacted in March 2009, an ex post analysis of demand is possible to evaluate relative costs and benefits of...

"Sustainably produced" food labels have rapidly grown in popularity over the past decade (Batte 2011). Moreover, because there is no government agency overseeing certification of these production methods, consumers are generally confused about the production attributes that may or may not be...

This research evaluates the impact of using different starting conditions in estimating meat demand systems. Results suggest that as the econometric task becomes increasingly nonlinear, specification of starting conditions becomes increasingly important. This work demonstrates implications of...

Food safety concerns have had dramatic impacts on food and livestock markets in recent years. Here we examine consumer preferences for various beef food safety assurances. In particular, we evaluate the extent to which such preferences are heterogeneous within and across country-of-residence...

This research evaluates the efficiency of swine firms differing by specialization type and employed technologies. Measures of technical, allocative, scale, economic, and overall efficiency are separately and jointly estimated for farrow-to-finish, farrow-to-feeder, feeder-to-finish,...

Beef food safety events have contributed to considerable market volatility, produced varied consumer reactions, created policy debates, sparked heated trade disputes, and generally contributed to beef industry frustrations. Better understanding of the forces causing observed consumer reactions...

Replaced with revised version of paper 7/21/09.

This paper presents the first known assessment of cheap talk effectiveness in a choice experiment conducted online with a focus on the distinction between impacts on stated willingness to pay at the population mean and in targeted sub-samples. Utilizing a large national survey and split-sample...

This research provides an efficiency evaluation of swine firms by specialization type providing estimates of technical, allocative, scale, and overall efficiency separately for farrow-to-finish, farrow-to-feeder, feeder-to-finish, farrow-to-weanling, and weanling-to-feeder operations. Results...