The industrial organization of agriculture is attracting growing interest, focused on the degree of competition in various input, product, and labor markets; slowing productivity growth; supply chain disruptions and sharply rising prices during recovery from the pandemic; and impacts of the sector’s organization on animal welfare, carbon emissions, and biodiversity.
To promote research on competition in the agricultural sector and the consequences of the industrial organization of this sector for consumers as well as input suppliers, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with the support of the Economic Research Service at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), will convene a research conference in Cambridge, MA on December 12, 2024. The conference will be organized by James MacDonald (University of Maryland) and Fiona Scott Morton (Yale University and NBER).
Potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Competition in markets that impact the food prices paid by consumers, including wholesale distribution and retail outlets.
- Competition in input markets at various points in the agricultural supply chain, including farm inputs such as equipment and chemicals, livestock, and labor
- Competition in markets for farm commodities, including livestock
- Supply chain resiliency and the relationship between resiliency and competition
- The impact of intellectual property rights on competition in seeds, agricultural chemicals, and information technology in food and agricultural markets
- The linkage between market structure in various agriculture-related markets and carbon emissions and biodiversity
The organizers will consider submissions of complete, or nearly complete, papers that will be ready to present by December 2024. They welcome empirical and theoretical research, papers by scholars who are early in their careers and who are not NBER affiliates, and submissions from researchers who are members of groups that are under-represented in the economics profession. If any members of the research team have ties to the agricultural industry or other potential conflicts of interest, they should be disclosed on the first page of the submission. The program will prioritize research on the U.S. food and farm economy.
To be considered for inclusion on the program, upload papers no later than midnight (EDT) on Thursday September 12, 2024.
Please feel free to share this call for papers widely with any researchers who might be working on projects that are suitable for presentation.
Please do not submit papers that have been accepted for publication and will be published by December, 2024. In keeping with NBER protocols, papers may not make policy recommendations. Authors chosen to present papers will be notified in mid-September. The NBER will cover hotel and economy-class conference travel for up to two authors per paper. The organizers will explore publishing a subset of the papers presented at this meeting in an edited NBER proceedings volume, or in a special issue of a refereed journal, subject to the interest of the presenters.
Questions about this conference may be addressed to confer@nber.org.