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AbstractSince the early 1990s, the retail market for leafy green vegetables has been divided between largely unprocessed products and bagged salads. The latter embody kitchen labor and economize on storage costs, in effect offering consumers convenience as a product attribute. Using time‐series retail purchase data, this paper shows that changes in income immediately influence how much convenience consumers of leafy greens purchase. There is no statistical evidence that total quantity of leafy greens purchased responds to short‐run changes in income. Hence, consumers appear to adjust to income changes by choosing food quality rather than quantity.

AbstractThe federal government has issued Dietary Guidelines for Americans seven times since 1980, but the 2005 whole‐grain recommendation was the first instance in which consumers were given a specific dietary target, that whole grains should be at least half of their grain consumption. Anecdotal evidence pointed to a unique result, an increase in demand for whole‐grain foods. Contemporaneous decreases in prices of whole‐grain foods, relative to refined‐grain foods, however, confound the evidence. We show that for whole‐grain bread, there was an increase in retail demand even after accounting for price changes. Separate models for higher‐ and lower‐income consumers show that the demand shift occurred among higher‐income consumers, but not for lower‐income consumers.

AbstractEconomic simulation studies of the effects of bovine growth hormone (bGH) on the dairy industry usually assume that producers will have the incentive to adopt bGH and that aggregate milk supply will increase. Based on the description of per‐cow milk yield response to bovine growth hormone (bGH), a short‐run model of milk production is developed to analyze the farm‐level incentives to adopt bGH. This analysis emphasizes that the incentives to adopt a new technology greatly depend on how it alters the existing production environment. Because higher levels of energy are needed in the cow to attain greater levels of production made possible with bGH, those farmers who can most easily and inexpensively expand energy levels in the cow will be most likely to adopt. The model identifies: (1) why farmers may not have the incentive to adopt the new technology; and (2) if farmers adopt bGH, they may not have the economic incentive to produce at the levels obtained in test studies.