This article reviews literature on competitiveness of agricultural product and input markets. Although researchers in the United States and Europe emphasize different stages of the agricultural and food marketing system, their focus is similar: extent of buyer power, although both have largely ignored the sector supplying inputs to agriculture. The key conclusion is that there is little robust empirical evidence for food processing firms exerting buyer power, and there are limited data concerning vertical contracts between food processing and agriculture, but there is a small body of evidence concerning food retailer behavior and vertical coordination between food retailing and processing.

We administered an online choice experiment to a sample of U.S. raw-oyster consumers to identify factors influencing preferences for Gulf of Mexico oysters, determined the extent of preference heterogeneity, and estimated marginal willingness to pay for specific varieties and other key attributes. Results indicate significant preference heterogeneity among select varieties, with non-Gulf respondents estimated to require a price discount on Gulf oyster varieties on the order of $3–$6/half dozen. Gulf respondents were found to be less sensitive to oyster variety, and estimated to be willing to pay a price premium only for select Gulf varieties on the order of $0–$3/half dozen.

In two-tier price systems, yield uncertainty creates incentives to overproduce quantity-restricted outputs even when prices for surplus output are very low. These incentives arise from precautionary motives against expected losses from quota shortfalls. Using an approach augmented for multiple input applications, the likelihood of excess production and the relative importance of price changes in different markets are estimated for Icelandic dairy farms. The results indicate that the average farm plans to exceed its quota, and price changes in the surplus milk market are approximately three times more effective in generating supply response than price changes in the quota milk market.

This article examines the relationship between Federal Reserve monetary policy and other macroeconomic indicators to both a broad commodity price index and an agricultural commodity price index by employing a vector error correction model. Excessive liquidity and the recent long period of ultralow interest rates appear to have played a statistically significant role in affecting prices in the commodities markets. The responses of commodity prices to monetary policy that we estimate generally conform to earlier findings, but the sensitivity of the responses appears different in the face of the unprecedented scope of recent Fed activism.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) releases crop condition reports detailing crop progress and growing conditions for various crops including corn, soybeans, and winter wheat. Previous research has investigated market impacts from various USDA reports, but crop condition reports have received little attention. This article investigates the impact of crop condition reports on winter wheat prices at the national level and for a local market. We employ both parametric and nonparametric tests. Results suggest that crop condition reports for winter wheat do not generally affect market prices. This contrasts with results found in corn and soybean markets.

Both schools and industry members are concerned about wages in the veterinary profession that are low relative to the years of schooling and tuition costs. This study examines the differences in starting salaries for the 2009–2014 graduates of the 28 schools accredited by the American Veterinary Medicine Association. Findings show relatively small (less than $4,000) but statistically significant differences in starting salaries related to school choice. A larger differential effect is present among the different practice types of veterinary medicine, with equine practitioners and private industry veterinarians (e.g., pharmaceutical researchers) representing the least and greatest average starting salaries, respectively.

Consumers implicitly incorporate their perceptions of products into their decision processes, yet little research has explicitly focused on how those perceptions influence demand for meat. This study incorporates taste, health, and safety perceptions into a discrete choice experiment for meat products at a grocery store. Our results indicate that taste is the most important perception as a 1-unit increase in the perceived tastiness (on a −5 to +5 scale) of a food product leads to a $0.60 increase in willingness to pay, whereas equivalent increases in perceived health and safety lead to $0.31 and $0.21 increases, respectively.