corn – Sound Economics

NAFTA and Corn

Posted on April 7, 2017 by Lukie Crowley — No Comments ↓

Corn is a pretty solid source of food. You can make cornbread. You can have corn on the cob and you can have corn off the cob. You can eat popcorn or you can have the variety of foods that have high fructose corn syrup. I promise this post will not all be about the ways you can prepare and eat corn, but it’s necessary to demonstrate how important of a food source it is (did I not mention that this is a food blog now?). Here’s another combination: NAFTA and corn! The United States produces a whole bunch of Continue reading NAFTA and Corn→

Bringing Perfect Competition to Life

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Matthew Moreno — No Comments ↓

Agriculture serves as a perennial example of a perfectly competitive market. This type of market trades in a homogenous product, which means one producer’s output cannot be easily distinguished from another’s. Additionally, a perfectly competitive market has low barriers to entry/exit; beginning or ending production must be cheap and quick. Also, a large set of buyers and sellers participate in these markets, so individual players cannot move the market. Ideal agriculture meets all these criteria: one sack of potatoes is essentially the same as any other, planting decisions are often flexible, and crop markets are mostly well populated. Last semester Continue reading Bringing Perfect Competition to Life→