Consumer and Market Responses to Mad Cow Disease

Wolfram Schlenker and Sofia Villas-Boas

American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2009, vol. 91, issue 4, 1140-1152

Abstract: We examine how consumers and financial markets in the United States reacted to two health warnings about mad cow disease: the first discovery of an infected cow in December 2003 and an Oprah Winfrey show that aired seven years earlier on the potentially harmful effects of mad cow disease. We find a pronounced and significant reduction in beef sales following the first discovery of an infected cow in a product-level scanner data set of a national grocery chain. Cattle futures show a pattern of abnormal price drops comparable to the scanner data. Contracts with longer maturity show smaller drops, suggesting that the market anticipated the impact to be transitory. Cattle futures show abnormal price drops after the Oprah Winfrey show that are more than 50% of the drop following the 2003 discovery of an infected cow. Copyright 2009, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (61)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1467-8276.2009.01315.x (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Consumer and Market Responses to Mad-Cow Disease (2009)
Working Paper: Consumer and Market Responses to Mad-Cow Disease (2008)
Working Paper: Consumer and Market Responses to Mad-Cow Disease (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:91:y:2009:i:4:p:1140-1152

Access Statistics for this article

American Journal of Agricultural Economics is currently edited by Madhu Khanna, Brian E. Roe, James Vercammen and JunJie Wu

More articles in American Journal of Agricultural Economics from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().