Download or read book Essays on Pricing and Policy in the U.S. Dairy Industry written by Charng-Jiun Yu and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dairy industry is one of the most important components in U.S. economy. Milk production added substantial value to the agricultural sector. In 2017, U.S. dairy farmers produced 38.1 billion dollars worth of milk. On the consumption side, Americans on average consume 244 pounds of dairy products in a year. Despite the significance of the U.S. dairy industry, several important economic issues in pricing and policy are not studied. With the improvement in data quality over the past decade, there is an emerging opportunity for empirical studies to analyze the U.S. dairy industry and provide economic insights to a more general scope. My dissertation provides empirical analysis to understand the pricing and policy issues for producers, retailers, and consumers in the U.S. dairy industry. Specifically, in the following three chapters I study the relationship between market power and farm-retail price transmission, the impact of environmental regulations on dairy farm management, and the relationship between price and perceived quality in consumer choice of cheese products. In the first chapter, I seek to understand the impact of market competitiveness on the degree of asymmetric price transmission and associated welfare implications. I estimate a kinked Almost Ideal Demand System for fluid milk products in 18 U.S. metropolitan areas. By conducting an asymmetric price transmission test, I find that cities with less competitive food retailing tend to exhibit asymmetric price transmission. The degree of price asymmetry and associated welfare loss are decreasing in the market competitiveness. The welfare analysis suggests that the welfare loss due to asymmetric price transmission is large in terms of the percentage of milk expenditures. The potential is for substantially higher future welfare loss given the ongoing consolidation in food retailing industry. In the second chapter, I quantify the impact of the Clean Water Act (CWA) on farm waste management practices of U.S. dairy concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). A double-hurdle model is employed to examine how dairy farmers adjust their practices in response to the major policy revision of the CWA in 2003. Using the 2000 and 2010 Agricultural Resource Management Survey data, I find that CAFO farmers who follow the management standards of the nutrient management plan (NMP) required by the CWA are more likely to implement manure storage after the policy revision. There are, however, no significant changes in storage capacity for those who have already adopted. Furthermore, CAFOs that fail to comply with NMPs did not make significant changes in storage capacity, land application of manure, and manure removal. The results suggest a heterogenous and limited impact of the CWA on waste management practices of dairy CAFOs. In the third chapter, I examine how prices affect consumers' perception of quality and consequently their product choices using individual consumers' purchase records in the U.S. cheese market. I hypothesize that price affects product choices by two channels: (i) a "pure price" effect directly affecting the purchase cost, and (ii) a "perceived quality" effect affecting the perceived product quality. In the empirical analysis, I complement the traditional mixed logit model with the conditions of purchasing behavior and utilize the Nielsen consumer panel and retail scanner data of the U.S. cheese markets from 2012 to 2014. The results suggest a strong perceived quality effect. With a 10% increase in the price of a cheese product, the corresponding choice probability would on average decrease by 5.4%, which consists of a 13.0% decrease due to higher purchase cost and a 7.6% increase driven by higher perceived quality. For approximately 10% of the cheese products, the ratios of the perceived quality elasticity to the total price elasticity are greater than 3.69; on the lower end, the ratios are lower than 0.24 for another 10% of the products. Such a large value is indicative of a large heterogeneity of the price impact on perceived quality across products. In addition, the impact of price on perceived varies across different types of households. Finally, I find that the perceived quality effect decreases with repeat purchases. These findings have significant implications for retailers' marketing strategy, government policy, and analysis of product competition.