All of samaramendez's Comments + Replies

Thanks for weighing in!

I read your comment to mean that you skimmed the butter and margarine studies that we considered in our brief analysis, but please correct me if I misunderstood.

Yes, I agree that there is very little consideration for price endogeneity in the butter and margarine studies that we found. I could have made that more clear in our report. I suppose that oversight is due to the studies generally skewing older and using older methods. One of the meta-analyses we reviewed (Auer and Papies, 2020) included price endogeneity in their analysis, ... (read more)

I would be happy to speak with your further, especially to further the cause of getting more economists/social scientists hired! I'll send you a PM.

Thanks for sharing this article and opening this discussion.

I'm also interested in hearing the general survey replies to understand what specifics the movement as a whole is looking for.

Anecdotally, I'm the economist at The Humane League Labs, and I tend to get a broad range of questions about cost-benefit analysis, consumer preferences (and how to change them), market structures, impact analysis, etc. What I actually work on tends to be causal inference, which is a place where economists' skills could be very helpful for the movement.

I have my PhD, and I know that my education level plus my resear... (read more)

It's great to see the magnitude of the change, and it will be interesting to see how it moves as the main cage-free commitment deadlines get closer.

Thanks for your comment! It's not much of a comment-generating piece, although I do hope that people might use the data for other projects. I am always excited to see data publicized here as well.

That's right, I remember that result in Veganomics as well. Looks like I need to revisit the literature.

The wealth relationship is very interesting here, not what I would have expected. I would be interested to see if the same relationships hold over different countries with different income distributions.

Thanks for sharing!

Sure, I didn't discuss the connection between your demand decrease and the remaining people's elasticities. Let's use Brian's example of the supermarket supply system to illustrate that connection.

When you stop buying chicken, demand in the store has decreased. Perhaps it decreases to the point where the store decides to put the chicken on sale. Other shoppers who still buy meat will see the sale price and change their purchases according to their price elasicities, which are defined as the percent change in quantity demanded given a 1%... (read more)

Thanks for the clarification, I understand your question now. You're asking about estimating the size of a demand shift that results from one economic agent leaving the market, as opposed to an elasticity. I believe we're asking the same question; with elasticities, I want to investigate the underlying mechanism that takes us from your leaving the market to a shift in the demand curve. Whereas you would like to know the end result only.

The answer to this question (the effect on aggregate demand of one person leaving the market) may be difficult t... (read more)

Many great points already about how to respond to your friend. I'd like to expand a bit on a few.

• Shaybenmosche mentions the connection between two markets that illustrates interesting subtleties. Yes, you leaving the market reduces demand for meat and likely lowers the price which may in turn increase demand for the remaining people in the market. But you entering the market for meat alternatives increases demand and price there, which will drive producers to innovate and/or enter the alternatives market.
• Cole points out that a shift of the demand cur

I just had a very quick look-through of Y&G, but it looks like they tested for curvilinear (i.e., a log transformation of GDP) only. I could be missing a footnote, but I don't believe they included a second-order GDP term to test a polynomial relationship.

However, the findings of the 2013 paper largely support that, from my quick reading. The estimation of the second-order coefficient is significant but basically zero for most of the different data slices. Further, when they back out the inflection points, the income levels for the turning point ... (read more)

Thanks for posting this update. I'm fairly new to the forum, so I missed the original posting of the two links you've provided.

These posts seem closely related to meat consumption Kuznets curves. I am not an expert in this literature and I intend to do more reading on the topic, but a quick search found this 2013 paper, which might be of interest to you. I've only briefly looked over the paper, but their results seem to update and support the findings of York and Gossard (2004). It seems that the expected turning point of the meat consumptio... (read more)