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This study investigates the causal relationship between total biomass energy consumption, total energy CO2 emissions, and GDP in the United States for the period January 1973–December 2016 by employing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) techniques and the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model. Additionally, this paper examines the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis. The result of the DAG reveals that total biomass energy consumption and GDP have a unidirectional contemporaneous causal relationship with total energy CO2 emissions. Based on the results of the ARDL, we find that a 1% increase in per capita total biomass energy consumption causes a 0.65% reduction in per capita total energy CO2 emissions in the long-run. This finding implies that expanding the usage of biomass is one way to reduce and control greenhouse gases in the US. Moreover, we find that the inverted U-shaped EKC hypothesis is satisfied for the US case. Findings from this study suggest that energy policies should stimulate an increase of biomass production for reducing total energy CO2.

This paper investigates the impact of new food safety regulations, a positive list system (PLS), on the vertical supply chain for bananas in Korea using monthly price data from January 2012 to Febr...

This paper investigates the impact of high U.S. maximum residue limit (MRL) standards on U.S vegetable exports to 102 countries utilizing the hierarchical model. MRL, which is one of non-tariff barriers with respect to food safety, is applied to home and foreign countries at the same time. Thus, firms in countries with higher food safety standards are expected to have a competitive advantage from the ‘signaling effect’. The results show that high MRL standards in the U.S. have a positive impact on U.S. vegetable exports, indicating the ‘signaling effect’ from the strict U.S. domestic MRL standards. The results provide policy makers with insights into how strict food safety regulations of the home country can be considered as a catalyst for increasing competitiveness in international markets.

The historical decomposition and directed acyclic graph methods are employed to estimate the effect of avian influenza in Korea on egg price transmission between the farm, wholesale, and retail levels. Our findings suggest that farm and retail egg prices are connected by the wholesale price. We also find that the farm-wholesale and the wholesale-retail margins increase during the avian influenza period. Our results imply that the retailer and wholesaler use their market power to increase their price during the food safety crisis. Therefore, the Korean government should control market power by allowing more emergency egg imports.

This study investigates price relationships between organic and conventional carrots, tomatoes, and lettuce in the U.S. utilizing Nielsen scanner data from 2006 to 2015. We employ a threshold vector error correction model (TVECM), threshold vector autoregressive model (TVAR), and threshold cointegration test to test whether market integration exists between organic and conventional vegetables as well as the existence of asymmetric price transmission. The results find positive long-run relationships between organic and conventional prices of carrots and tomatoes and show the existence of asymmetric price transmission in price pairs of lettuce and tomatoes. Our findings suggest that the price relationship between organic and conventional vegetables varies by characteristics, such as shelf life and volatility in the price premium. Furthermore, the results indicate that consumers in the U.S. recognize organic and conventional carrots and tomatoes as partially substitutable goods, while U.S. consumers consider organic and conventional lettuces as different goods (no cross-price relationship).

This paper examines the effects of aging and income subsidies on farm efficiency in Korea by utilizing the Korean Farm Household Economic Survey from 2008 to 2015. A stochastic frontier model with a non-monotonic assumption on the effect of efficiency factors is implemented to reflect a super aging and less developed production structure in Korean agriculture. This study finds continuously decreasing farm efficiency with age, which contradicts the commonly assumed inverted-U relationship between age and productivity. Especially, we find that labor is the most important factor to explain recent farm efficiency losses in Korea. Furthermore, this paper finds that the Korean income subsidy has a negative effect on farm efficiency. Our results provide two policy implications for the government of Korea. First, even though the &ldquo, Returns to the Farm and Rural program&rdquo, is appropriate, Korea should modify the program to encourage more young people to participate this program rather than old people, in order to attain the sustainable development of the agricultural sector. Second, a policy maker in Korea should consider a coupled subsidy that is directly related to farm production rather than a decoupled subsidy, regardless of the lower efficiency of the coupled subsidy in achieving agricultural development.