Agricultural Economics最新文献

The United States authorized unprecedented investments in agri-environmental programs in 2022, dedicating over $19 billion to soil and water conservation practices with climate mitigation and adaptation benefits. We examine historical funding patterns, new funding allocations, and evaluation approaches for these programs. Our analysis reveals four key findings: (1) Nearly 40% of prior conservation funding has supported climate-beneficial practices, with increasing shares reflecting growing producer demand; (2) Although enrollment of historically underserved producers (HUPs) has increased, variation across programs and higher contract non-completion rates among this group suggests enhanced pre- and post-enrollment support services could be valuable; (3) A shift toward partnership-style programs facilitate locally-tailored agreements and market linkages, potentially broadening producer participation while enabling more durable incentives for sustained practice adoption; (4) current evaluation approaches primarily focus on implementation metrics paired with biophysical modeling and could be strengthened through rigorous impact evaluation design. Promising techniques include conducting randomized experiments and integrating geospatial data with program records to assess the impacts on producer behavior as well as program outcomes over time and space. Such approaches can build evidence for strategic conservation finance and de-risk future investments for other types of financial services—accelerating transformation toward sustainable agri-food systems in the United States and beyond.

This study introduces a new concept and framework called Climate Resilient Development for Agriculture (CRDA) to serve as a roadmap for agricultural transformation in the face of climate change. It also explores how to address gender inequity in agriculture during this transformation process. Unlike Climate Resilient Agriculture (CRA), which focuses solely on adjusting farming practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and maintain agricultural production in the face of climate change, CRDA takes a more comprehensive approach by integrating a development perspective. Its goal is to leverage synergies among actions, programs, and policies to achieve climate change mitigation, adaptation, and sustainable development goals while also addressing climate change induced loss and damage in the agriculture sector. The CRDA framework outlines potential pathways leading to either high or low CRDA futures and emphasizes the importance of gender equity in its structure. Additionally, the study highlights the potential for actions under the CRDA framework to either exacerbate or mitigate gender disparities and proposes five key actions that can contribute to a gender-inclusive and climate-resilient future for the agriculture sector.

Technological advancements, such as online grocery shopping, have significantly transformed consumer retail environments and experiences. Effectively studying consumer behavior in these new environments requires the use of novel methodological approaches, which will also aid in developing interventions to encourage sustainable consumption. This paper begins by providing an overview of the current literature on novel approaches to analyzing consumer behavior, then provides an empirical application by examining consumer decision-making pathways within an online grocery shopping platform. Specifically, the paper focuses on exploring the consumers' digital footprints, such as page visits, product additions and removals, and interactions with information labels to identify patterns and interests in consumer responses to healthy and sustainable consumption. Findings highlight the potential benefits of integrating consumer search tracking data with environmental design to facilitate informed and conscious food choices.

Measuring power is central to empirical work on intrahousehold and gender relations. This paper reviews how progress in the measurement of power within households has facilitated our understanding of household decision-making and creates new opportunities for programs and policy. Early efforts to test household models focused on measuring spousal bargaining power, usually in models featuring two decision-makers within the household. Proxy measures for bargaining power included age, education, assets, and “outside options” that could affect spouses’ threat points within marriage. Evidence rejecting the collective model of the household has influenced the design of policies and programs, notably conditional cash transfer programs. Efforts have since shifted to measuring empowerment, drawing on theories of agency and power. Since 2010, several measures of women's empowerment have been developed, including the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and its variants. A distinct feature of the WEAI, like other counting-based measures, is its decomposability into its component indicators, which makes identifying sources of disempowerment possible. The WEAI indicators also embody jointness of decision-making or ownership, which better reflects actual decision-making within households compared to 2-person bargaining models. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research.

Despite the extensive use of industry expectations in measuring forecast accuracy and price reactions to USDA reports, very little is known about their properties beyond the basic statistical characteristics of bias, rationality, efficiency, and relative accuracy. Using unique proprietary data of firm-level expectations for upcoming USDA corn and soybean production estimates, we demonstrate that these forecasts exhibit cognitive biases such as attribution and anchoring. Prior success leads to overconfidence and bolder forecasts, and firms base their forecasts on a known reference value. We also show that the bolder the forecasts, the lesser the accuracy, indicating that substantially deviating from the herd does not pay off when it comes to crop production forecasts.