This study assesses the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese residents’ food safety knowledge and behavior, and explores the possible influence mechanism, namely, focus on media information.  The study is based on internet survey data of 1 373 residents in China.  A series of econometric models are developed to estimate food safety knowledge and behavior of residents.  Both the descriptive and econometric results indicate that the existence of COVID-19 cases in a community has a significantly positive effect on residents’ food safety knowledge and behavior.  Residents focusing on food safety-related information tend to have higher food safety knowledge and practice food safety behavior.  When controlling the variable focused on food safety-related information, the marginal effects of the existence of COVID-19 cases in a community on residents’ food safety knowledge and behavior significantly decrease.  However, the decrease in consumers’ food safety knowledge is quite minor.  Hence, the COVID-19 pandemic indeed improves Chinese residents’ food safety knowledge and behavior, while focus on food safety-related information is an important mechanism for improving food safety behavior.  Moreover, the estimation results of the simultaneous equations model reveal that consumers’ food safety knowledge has a significant and positive effect on their food safety behavior.  Heterogeneous impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on residents’ food safety knowledge and behavior among different regions and income groups are observed.  The findings of this study provide evidence that public health events could enhance residents’ safety awareness and behavior, while residents’ focus on relevant information plays an important role in improving knowledge and impacting behavior.

Inefficient use of fertilizer has caused serious environmental problems and unsustainable development of agriculture in China.  To meet the increasing food demand in the future without damaging the ecological environment, Chinese government officially launched the Action Plan for the Zero Growth of Fertilizer Use in 2015.  At the same time, China released a series of policies aiming explicitly at expanding farm size and a great number of large scale farmers emerged recently.  However, whether the expansion of farm size will be beneficial for the increase of fertilizer use efficiency still remains to be investigated.  In this study, we comprehensively explored the relationship between fertilizer use efficiency and farm size.  Based on the 4?281 farm households’ survey data collected by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) of China from 2004 to 2016 in Jiangsu Province, China, this paper applies a stochastic frontier production function to estimate fertilizer use efficiency across farm size and uses a regression model to analyze the influence of farm size on fertilizer use efficiency.  The results show that: (1) the average fertilizer use efficiency of whole samples was only 0.60, much lower than the average technical efficiency, indicating that on average half of the fertilizer utilized are excessive in China; and (2) the smallest farm size group get the highest fertilizer use efficiency score.  We also provide some possible explanations for the inverse relationship between farm size and fertilizer use efficiency.