American Journal of Agricultural Economics最新文献

Hurricanes are considered among the most destructive natural disasters in the United States. The exposure of agricultural production systems to hurricanes varies between regions in contrast to global risks like commodity price volatility and international trade policies. The regional differences in hurricane exposure may lead to heterogeneity in crop insurance premium rates. This work aims to measure the impact of hurricane incidence on production losses for crops grown in the Mississippi Delta. We leverage a county-month panel of insurance losses spanning 2002–2021 from the US Department of Agriculture Risk Management Agency, and daily data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Hurricane Center, to construct novel measures for hurricane treatment assignment under a difference-in-differences identification strategy. We find hurricane incidence results in economically significant losses that are strikingly heterogeneous across crops. We also demonstrate that measuring hurricane treatment is a critical concern for credible identification as simplistic approaches are associated with attenuation bias relative to our approach which accounts for the dynamic changes in the scope and intensity of a hurricane. We discuss implications of these results for two important policy instruments, traditional crop insurance premium rating and the more recently released Hurricane Insurance Protection—Wind Index product.

We study racial differences in internal migration responses to one of the most severe climatic shocks in US history—the drought of the 1930s. Using data from the 1940 census on 70 million adults, we find that individuals exposed to more severe drought between 1935 and 1940 were more likely to make an inter-county move and that this responsiveness was greater for Black individuals than White individuals. This racial difference was particularly pronounced among the rural population. Black individuals' migration premium came despite their systematic disadvantage in the economy of the 1930s and evidence along dimensions other than race that disadvantage limited individuals' ability to adapt to the drought through migration. Federal relief spending under the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) magnified this racial difference, reducing the migration response to drought for White individuals and increasing it for Black individuals. These results help to better understand how the reactions of different groups aggregate to determine the magnitude and composition of migration responses to natural disasters, as well as the roles of migration and government policy in disadvantaged groups' responses to natural disasters.

Balancing conflicting policy goals is a key challenge in the transition to sustainable agricultural systems. An important example is herbicide use reduction potentially conflicting with conservation tillage—which often strongly relies on herbicide use. We investigate the joint uptake of two agri-environmental schemes, conservation tillage and herbicide-free agriculture systems. To this end, we use a combination of detailed survey data on farmer behavior, environmental and agronomic data, and census data on the complete population of all farmers from Switzerland. Findings based on a multinomial logit and fixed effects multinomial logit indicate that, conditional on observable factors, the systems are not complementary, but joint adoption occurs for 35% of farmers. Behavioral factors explain 26% of joint adoption behavior, emphasizing the role of risk taking, openness to innovation, and biodiversity valuations in farmers' decisions. Our analysis provides broader implications for assessing and navigating conflicting sustainability goals in agriculture globally.

Farm delinquency is linked to many negative indicators of farm survival, including increased risk of bankruptcy and farm failure. Minority farmers and ranchers (MFR) have been found to exhibit higher rates of delinquency on U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farm Service Agency (FSA) loans compared to their non-Hispanic White male counterparts. These findings persist even after accounting for economic/financial factors expected to predict loan repayment performance. In this study, to further explore the existing discrepancy between loan default rates for MFR and White, non-Hispanic borrowers, we look more broadly than financial indicators and introduce MFR representation on the FSA County Office Committee (COC) as a proxy for the local cultural climate in an agricultural community. Using changes in COC membership demographics over time and across counties, this study suggests that MFR representation on the COC is associated with a lower probability of MFR delinquency by roughly 10 percentage points. With the probability of delinquency also being about 10 percentage points higher among MFR, the effect represents a significant improvement in loan repayment outcomes for the group. The FSA COCs represent an important linkage between the USDA and the local agricultural community. Moreover, elected minority representation on COCs can be considered as indicative of supportive cultural climates for minorities in agriculture. Given that COC membership composition may represent a proxy for local cultural climate in agriculture, this research raises interesting questions about the potential relationship of MFR representation and community engagement, to FSA program performance.

Understanding the impacts of environmental conditions is critical for shaping policies aimed at improving human capital outcomes in developing contexts. This study utilizes individual-level data on children from Pakistan to investigate the impact of rainfall shocks, from the in-utero stage to age 16, on human capital development. The results reveal that positive rainfall shocks reduce cognitive performance in older children (ages 11–16), as their school attendance declines and their participation in labor increases. In contrast, younger children (ages 5–10) are mostly unaffected. Positive rainfall shocks during school transition and early teenage years (ages 11–16) reduce the overall educational attainment among young adults (ages 16–30) and increase the likelihood of marriage between ages 18 and 24. Conversely, children born during years of positive rainfall shocks exhibit improved physical and cognitive development, and are less likely to engage in child marriage or child labor. These long-term effects are especially pronounced among girls.

Smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries face several constraints to technology adoption. We test the relative efficacy of interventions designed to incentivize the production and consumption of a biofortified orange-fleshed sweet potato crop by female farmers in Uganda. Through a clustered randomized controlled trial involving more than 8000 female farmers across 210 communities, we track the impact of the interventions on adoption, consumption, and health outcomes, both in the short term and long term. Our findings suggest that the provision of inputs and agricultural extension is an effective approach to adoption, leading over 60% of households to cultivate and 50% to consume the crop. Nutrition training emphasizing the crop's health benefits has limited impact on cultivation, but it leads 20% of households to consume the biofortified crop. Combining the two approaches with supplementary credit and insurance products has limited marginal effects on adoption. We also observe improvements in dietary diversity resulting from the tested interventions, along with spillover effects through social networks in neighboring communities. We find little evidence of treatment effects on higher-order outcomes such as visual acuity, child health and nutrition, or income.

Many fish consumers reveal a preference for sustainably sourced seafood in their purchasing decisions. We propose a bioeconomic modeling approach and an empirical strategy, based on a discrete choice experiment, to quantify the resulting effects on fishery dynamics and to derive implications for efficient fishery management. We show that a “consumer stock effect” arises, which stabilizes a fishery under open access and which decreases catches under economically efficient management. We quantify these effects for the Western Baltic cod fishery.

Most studies on gender gaps in agricultural productivity leverage within-household differences between plots managed by women and men. Such a gender-based division of plot management simplifies empirical tests for productivity differences, but it is not a common arrangement outside some locations in sub-Saharan Africa. In most rural households, women and men jointly participate in production, complicating the identification of gender-based productivity differences. This study proposes a broader empirical test of productivity gaps that applies to such systems and is rooted in gender-based inequities rather than gender per se. We explore productivity gaps in rice-cultivating Indian households, where women and men perform distinct cultivation tasks. We measure productivity gaps based on the differential use of family and hired female labor across households and then compare them with gaps based on the differential use of family and hired male labor. Using plot-level data, we identify significant gender-based productivity gaps after controlling for input use and plot- and household-level characteristics, along with using village fixed effects and machine learning estimators to address selection and model misspecification concerns. We find that households using family female labor have lower agricultural productivity than those also hiring female workers, such that forgone production value is greater than the cost of hiring women. We find suggestive evidence that this gap stems from skill differences between hired and family female workers. In contrast, we find no similar gap regarding male labor use. Overall, household welfare is lower because of gender-based inequities, and highlights the potential productivity implications of expanding women's labor choices in both on- and off-farm roles.

Using data on the site choices of marine recreational anglers fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, we build on previous literature that finds anglers are willing to encumber travel costs to avoid sites located in areas with more predominant Black and Hispanic populations. Upon exploring the nature of this discrimination, we find results that are consistent with the predictions of statistical discrimination theory, as more experienced anglers discriminate less than less experienced anglers. We also find some results consistent with taste-based discrimination, as we observe different degrees of discrimination among anglers from less (more) diverse trip origins. However, the evidence of taste-based discrimination disappears in analyses using a novel dataset containing angler-level race and ethnicity data. We conclude that the observed discrimination is predominantly statistical in nature, a product of a choice setting involving imperfect information that becomes less imperfect as anglers gain experience.

We explore ethnic and gender disparities in U.S. agriculture by comparing productivity gaps between male- and female-headed family farms, and between non-Hispanic White and minority-headed family farms. Using Agricultural Resource Management Survey data from 2017 to 2020, propensity score matching techniques are applied to obtain comparable samples based on observable covariates. Statistical tests reveal structural differences in production technologies between male- and female-headed farms, and between non-Hispanic White and minority-headed farms, thus requiring the estimation of separate production technologies for each group. Accordingly, a stochastic metafrontier framework is used to envelop the group frontiers and assess technology gaps. The results indicate that female and minority-principal operators not only use different production technologies but are also less proficient at combining inputs to maximize farm output. The results also reveal within-group gender and ethnic differences—ceteris paribus, among non-Hispanic White and minority-led farms, female producers generated substantially less output compared to their male counterparts. Similarly, among male principal operators, Hispanic producers generated more output compared to their non-Hispanic White and non-Hispanic non-White counterparts.