Journal of Rural Economics

Australia is the world's front runner in farmer-driven R&D system reforms. Collective funding bodies operate on the farmers' levy, and they budget public R&D projects satisfying farmers' needs. This paper applies an innovation system perspective to explain how those funding bodies steer R&D at the following stages: project setup, project management, and farmer adoption. The behaviors of actors in the system, such as managers of the funding body (Meat&Livestock Australia Ltd., MLA), researchers, and extension officers are examined. The findings are as follows: (i) Effective interactions among actors are observed in the northern beef sector. (ii) MLA promoted and controlled the interaction by flexibly designing who and how to interact at each stage. (iii) From the interaction, MLA obtained local specific information, such as farmers' technical problems, researchers' abilities, and research progress, which served as a basis for steering R&D rightly.

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This paper aims to investigate the effects of the mass food poisoning caused by processed milk and the intentional mislabeling of beef on the market risk of the excess stock returns of three companies in the Japanese milk industry by using the event-study methodology, a branch of financial econometrics. The dynamic conditional correlation GARCH model is fit to the excess return data to estimate the volatilities and dynamic conditional correlations of the corporations concerned. The results show that both events rapidly change the volatilities of the mentioned company and that these events influence the volatilities of one of the remaining two companies. Moreover, we find that the dynamic conditional correlations between this firm and the other firms changed rapidly when the beef mislabeling scandal was exposed but changed gradually when the mass food poisoning occurred. Therefore, one can conclude that the stock market can react immediately to unethical behavior of food-related firms.

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