Conference Agenda

Consumer taste for organic products has grown, increasing demand and costs along agricultural value chains. We estimate the impact of the world's largest certification system -- USDA organic -- on exporters from one of the world's most important organic production regions -- Latin America. For that purpose, we use a novel dataset which combines the universe of agricultural export transactions from 10 countries in Latin America with the universe of organic certifications granted by the US Department of Agriculture since 2012. Our results indicate that certified firms increase exports to the USA relative to non-certified firms. Spillover effects are positive within firms, as certified firms increase exports of certified products to other destinations and non-certified products to the USA. Spillover effects are negative across firms: the more firms are already certified in the USA, the less that exports increase following certification.

This study addresses the challenge of reducing meat consumption by implementing informational and supportive newsletter interventions. In a field experiment, we sent newsletters to participants via email every two weeks for four months. Self-reported meat consumption was observed before the intervention and in four follow-up periods over one year using online surveys. One type of newsletters focused on the environmental benefits of reduced meat consumption, while the other provided vegetarian recipes. We found that although meat consumption declined over time, there was no statistically significant difference between the treatment and control groups. Treated individuals were also not more likely to choose a voucher for a vegetarian meal box instead of a voucher for a meal box with meat. This suggests that informing individuals about the environmental benefits of reducing meat consumption and providing support through vegetarian recipes via regular newsletters may not have an impact on meat consumption.

We conduct a survey on the adjudication of conflicting water needs in France and in India, with 1000 respondents in each country. We ask respondents to give a fairness score to several allocation rules (equal awards, constrained equal awards, constrained equal losses, proportional, reverse-Talmud, priority rules), and to indicate what a fair allocation of water between the different claimants should be. We implement different treatments varying the type of claimants and the intensity of water scarcity. We show that the distribution of the ranking of scores significantly differ across treatments. Moreover we find that most respondents do not consistently allocate water according to rules commonly used in the existing literature. Only 18% of allocations reported by respondents are consistent with the proportional rule which is yet considered as one of the most attractive. Lastly, we demonstrate that respondent choices tend to violate axioms considered as standard in the conflicting claim literature (equal treatment of equals, anonymity and order preservation). However, respondents don't always explicitly express a preference for one of the claimants when asked to do so, even among those violating the previous axioms.

This paper identifies market failure caused by an animal welfare externality that

occurs if the private animal friendliness in a market economy falls short of the

social animal friendliness used to determine the efficient allocation. Efficiency can be restored by taxing the quantity of animal food and subsidizing the quality per unit of animal food. With consumer and producer heterogeneity, efficiency can also be attained by regulating outdoor husbandry farming with an ambitious quality standard and a subsidy on the animal food quantity and factory farming with a lower quality standard and a tax on animal food quantity.