Ms. Xi He, University of Connecticut
Seminar Title: “Bigger Farms, Bigger Food Processors: Does Agricultural Concentration Affect the Concentration of Food Industries?”
Abstract:
This paper develops a model of firm behavior to generate testable predictions of how concentration in upstream agricultural production affects concentration in the downstream food manufacturing sector. It then uses three independent identification strategies to quantify the causal effect of agricultural production concentration using county-level data from the 1982 to 2012 Censuses of Agriculture. The first strategy uses weather-induced variation of agricultural concentration, the second strategy uses the variation of agricultural concentration caused by government payment programs, and the last strategy exploits a policy change that made oilseed eligible for government payments. I find that a more concentrated agricultural production sector leads to a more concentrated food manufacturing sector: at the sample means, a 2.7% increase of the Gini of agricultural production leads to a 2.0% increase of Gini of food manufacturing. In addition, the concentration change in the farm sector explains about 33% of the concentration change in the food manufacturing sector from 1992 to 1997.
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
3:00pm - 4:15pm
George C. White Building, room 209
View the full Fall 2018 ARE Seminar Schedule
For more information, contact: Tatiana Andreyeva at tatiana.andreyeva@uconn.edu