"This paper examines how prices, markups and marginal costs respond to trade liberalization. We develop a framework to estimate markups from production data with multi-product firms. This approach does not require assumptions on the market structure or demand curves faced by firms, nor assumptions on how firms allocate their inputs across products. We exploit quantity and price information to disentangle markups from quantity-based productivity, and then compute marginal costs by dividing observed prices by the estimated markups. We use India’s trade liberalization episode to examine how firms adjust these performance measures. Not surprisingly, we find that trade liberalization lowers factory-gate prices. However, the price declines are small relative to the declines in marginal costs, which fall predominantly because of the input tariff liberalization. The reason is that firms offset their reductions in marginal costs by raising markups. This limited pass-through of cost reductions attenuates the reform’s impact on prices. Our results demonstrate substantial heterogeneity and variability in markups across firms and time and suggest that producers benefited relative to consumers, at least immediately after the reforms. To the extent that higher firm profits lead to the new product introductions and growth, long-term gains to consumers may be substantially higher."

"This paper examines the degree to which world price signals have been transmitted into domestic prices for eight countries and ten commodities, a total of 31 country/commodity pairs. The main characteristic of these countries was that they all undertook substantial policy reforms during the mid-1980s to early 1990s. The paper investigates the effect of reforms on the speed at which signals were transmitted to domestic markets and on the extent of price transmission. We find that Chile, Mexico, and Argentina are the only countries whose domestic commodity markets were integrated with world markets. For the remaining cases (Ghana, Madagascar, Indonesia, Egypt, and Colombia) in only a few country/commodity pairs is there some passthrough of world price changes. In terms of the effects of policy reforms, in the majority of the cases the hypothesis of a structural break following the reform year is rejected. "

"The objective of this project is to develop a Western Canadian
corn market model to be included in the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), Food and Agriculture Regional Model (FARM). Corn has gained importance recently in the feed grain market in Western Canada. The substantial increase in livestock production, rise in malting barley exports, increased incidence of fusarium in Manitoba and the recent drought conditions have significantly contributed to the rapid reduction of the feed grain surplus in this region of Canada. As a result, corn imports from the United States have become the safety valve of this market in Western Canada. For these reasons, a detailed analysis of the Western Canadian feed grain and livestock markets cannot be undertaken without incorporating a corn component."