Impact of Population Age Structure on Food Consumption Structure of Residents in Beijing

Based on the Beijing panel data from 1990 to 2019, this paper expands the traditional Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) model by introducing the nutritional needs indicators by age structure and quantitatively analyzes the structure and characteristics of household food consumption in Beijing. The study estimates and compares the income elasticity, price elasticity, nutritional demand elasticity of food consumption structure, and the per capita food consumption in Beijing is predicted. The results show that commodity prices and income are still the key factors affecting consumer demand. The change in the population's age structure also has a corresponding impact on the consumption structure. The consumption structure of Beijing is in the stage of optimization, and relevant departments should formulate relevant policies to increase farmers' income and stabilize prices.

Lobbying in the Political Economy of International Trade

While the role of lobbying in trade policy determination has been studied in a formal way since the early 1980s, it was the pathbreaking 1994 work by Grossman and Helpman in the following decade that led many scholars, using that framework (often with some modifications), to study many interesting political economy issues in the trade policy arena. Importantly, Grossman and Helpman were also the first to provide microfoundations to lobbying within a multisectoral, specific-factors framework. Moreover, the industry-level protection they derive is an empirically estimable function of measurable industry characteristics and other political and economic factors. With everything else held constant, organized sectors are able to obtain higher protection than unorganized sectors, with organized-sector protection inversely related to import penetration and import demand elasticity. Grossman and Helpman’s work gave an impetus to theory-driven empirical work in the political economy of trade policy, including the empirical investigation of the Grossman–Helpman model itself and its many extensions. There is now also a fairly large literature trying to explain the unrealistically high empirical estimates of the model’s parameters (representing the proportion of population politically organized and the weight the government attaches to aggregate welfare relative to political contributions). Extensions for empirical investigation that include bringing in competition between upstream and downstream lobbies, imperfect capturing of nontariff barrier (NTB) rents by the government, foreign lobbies, the possibility of misclassfication of sectors into organized and unorganized, and so forth partially correct the unrealistic parameter estimates. In addition, there are extensions that have been applied toward explaining policy changes and puzzles. Those extensions deal with lobby formation, trade agreements, unilateralism versus reciprocity in trade policy, lobbying for protection in declining industries, firm-level lobbying, the choice of policy instruments, and so forth. Despite so much work already done on lobbying and trade policy, the existing literature is deficient in the study of the choice of instruments, the antitrade bias in trade policy, and informational lobbying.

Green urbanization

Large cities are more productive and generate more output per person. Using data from the UK on energy demand and waste generation, we show that they are also more energy-efficient. Large cities are therefore greener than small towns. The amount of energy demanded and waste generated per person is decreasing in total output produced, that is, energy demand and waste generation scale sublinearly with output. Our research provides the first direct evidence of green urbanization by calculating the rate at which per capita electricity use and waste decrease with city population. The energy demand elasticity with respect to city output is 83%: as the total output of a city increases by one percent, energy demand increases less than one percent, and the Urban Energy Premium is therefore 17%. The energy premium by source of energy demand is from households (13%), transport (20%), and industry (16%). Similarly, we find that the elasticity of waste generation with respect to city output is 90%. For one percent increase in total city output, there is a less than one percent increase in waste, with an Urban Waste Premium of 10%. Because large cities are energy-efficient ways of generating output, energy efficiency can be improved by encouraging urbanization and thus green living. We perform a counterfactual analysis in a spatial equilibrium model that makes income taxes contingent on city population, which attracts more people to big cities. We find that this pro-urbanization counterfactual not only increases economic output but also lowers energy consumption and waste production in the aggregate.

A Simple Method for Bounding the Elasticity of Growing Demand with Applications to the Analysis of Historic Antitrust Cases

We propose a simple method, requiring only minimal data, for bounding demand elasticities in growing, homogeneous-product markets. Since growing demand curves cannot cross, shifts in market equilibrium over time can be used to “funnel” the demand curve into a narrow region, bounding its slope. Our featured application assesses the antitrust remedy in the 1952 DuPont decision, ordering incumbents to license patents for commercial plastics. We bound the demand elasticity significantly below 1 in many post-remedy years, inconsistent with monopoly, supporting the remedy’s effectiveness. A second application investigates whether the 1911 dissolution of American Tobacco fostered competition in the cigarette market. (JEL K21, L24, L65, L66, N41, N42, O34)

Research on the evolutionary game of knowledge pricing in an open innovation environment: from the perspective of social dual innovation balance

PurposeThis paper aims to find out the factors that influence the choice of dual innovation strategies in the process of knowledge pricing and transaction between first-mover and late-mover companies in an open innovation environment and also to find the key factors that affect the company's strategic choice in factors such as heterogeneous market environment, demand elasticity, exploration risk intellectual property prices and transaction cost.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses the Cournot equilibrium and Stackelberg two-stage master-slave game model to describe the evolutionary process of knowledge pricing in an open innovation environment of first-mover and late-mover companies.FindingsResearch shows that in an open innovation environment, the formation of a dual innovation strategy in the pricing process of corporate intellectual property transactions is a complex process. Changes in one-time transaction costs and changes in the inverse demand coefficient of the innovation market play the decisive role in the choice of dual innovation strategies. When the demand of the innovation market is moderate, the inverse demand coefficient of the innovation market and the one-time transaction cost has an inverted U-shaped influence relationship. As the innovation market's inverse demand coefficient and the one-time transaction cost increase at the same time, the degree of differentiation of the enterprise's dual innovation strategy choice gradually reduces; when the one-time transaction cost is the largest, the degree of strategy differentiation is minimized.Originality/valueBased on the above relationship, suggestions are made to guide enterprises in the knowledge pricing and transaction process in an open innovation environment, promote enterprises to form a dislocation development and complementary advantages in the knowledge innovation ecological chain and improve the overall innovation efficiency of the industry.

Elasticity and substitutability of food demand and emerging disease risk on livestock farms

Disease emergence in livestock is a product of environment, epidemiology, and economic forces. The environmental and epidemiological factors contributing to novel pathogen emergence in humans have been studied extensively, but the two-way relationship between farm microeconomics and outbreak risk has received comparably little attention. We introduce a game-theoretic model where farmers produce and sell two goods one of which (e.g. pigs, poultry) is susceptible to infection by a pathogen potentially dangerous to humans. We model market effects and epidemiological effects at both the individual farm level and the community level. The addition of a second good into this modeling framework ensures that producing a unit of livestock has an opportunity cost. We find that in the case of low demand elasticity for livestock meat, the presence of an animal pathogen causing large production losses can lead to a bistable system where two outcomes are possible, depending on the economic inputs into the system. One outcome is succesful disease control. The second outcome, a potentially dangerous one, is a stable equilibrium where farmers slaughter their animals at a low rate, face substantial production losses, but maintain large herds because of the appeal of high meat market prices, therefore maintaining disease circulation. We show the potential epidemiological benefits to (i) policies aimed at stabilizing livestock product prices, (ii) subsidies for alternative agricultural activities during epidemics, and (iii) diversifying agricultural production and sources of proteins available to consumers.