UC Davis

In my dissertation, I explore the welfare implications of market imperfections in agrifood systems, focusing on agricultural production and food consumption. For the agricultural production part, I examine how imperfections in the land rental market may influence the welfare gains of securing land ownership in Latin American countries, where land ownership distributions are highly unequal. My theoretical and empirical analyses suggest that potential landlords may face a trade-off between investing in land-attached capital and renting out land following an improvement in land ownership security. This situation may emerge when tenants do not adequately take care of landlords’ land-attached capital under short-term land rental contracts. A critical contributing factor could be non-security barriers to long-term land rental contracts, such as legal caps on land leasing durations and landlords’ preferences for flexible, short-term contracts. Numerical results indicate that these non-security barriers in the land rental market could hinder land access for the rural poor, thereby disproportionately reducing their welfare gains from securing land ownership. For the food consumption part, I examine the increasing market power in the US food retail sector through the lens of consumer demand. Using IRI and NielsenIQ scanner data, my co-authors and I find that store-level price elasticities of demand for food items have been decreasing, allowing grocery stores with local market power to charge consumers higher markups. Interestingly, one prominent reason for this trend is the rise in income.