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This paper is a survey of the recent literature devoted to the economics of private labels. After providing some statistics about the development of private labels for different products in different OECD countries, the survey outlines what the literature says about the factors that favor the development of private labels, the reasons retailers introduce private labels, and the consequences of their development for the relationship between manufacturers and retailers. Issues that are less frequently addressed in the literature are also highlighted. The survey closes with discussing the impact of the development of private labels on welfare.

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This article considers an agricultural production model of sequential nitrogen application under risk. Because of random shocks between subsequent production stages, optimal fertilization decisions depend on the magnitude of farmers' risk aversion (risk premium), and the possibility for farmers to process information (value of information). We propose a joint estimation procedure of technology and risk aversion parameters, using a structural, simulation-based econometric procedure. Parameter estimates allow to compute both the value of information and the risk premium, which account for about 30% of fertilizer cost for Midwest corn producers. Copyright 2000, Oxford University Press.

We study the optimal environmental taxation and enforcement policy when (i) the regulator does not know the firms' abatement costs, (ii) penalties for tax evasion are limited, and (iii) monitoring of pollution is costly. We show that the threat of being audited alter the usual firms' incentives to over-estimate their abatement costs. In particular, depending on the firms' abatement costs, the optimal policy may involve over or under-deterrence compared to the full information outcome. We then investigate the properties of a pollution standard. We show that this policy comes close to an environmental tax once the economic incentives of the accompanying enforcement policy are considered.