American Journal of Agricultural Economics最新文献

This paper evaluates the impact of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's (CME) decision to close the livestock futures pits on the execution quality of customer orders. Our findings suggest that, prior to its closure, the livestock futures pit offers high immediacy execution and attracts large orders. Because such high immediacy orders generally execute faster and cost more, their migration to the electronic market after the pit closure explains why the execution of electronic orders becomes on average speedier and more expensive for customers who used to be active pit users. However, our results also indicate that these pit-user customers face a lower overall execution cost following the pit closure when we account for all their orders, pit and electronic.

Deforestation in the tropics is a critical issue that interacts with global environmental changes, and the mediating role of negative agricultural shocks is ambiguous. We investigate the impact of the massive epidemic of coffee leaf rust (CLR) that affected Mexico from 2012 on deforestation. CLR is a fungal disease that negatively affects coffee production. We exploit the gradual spread of the epidemic across coffee-growing municipalities and estimate a difference-in-differences model. We find that deforestation increased by 32% in CLR-affected municipalities, but we find no increase in agricultural land. We find evidence of deforestation in cropland area, and our effects are driven by states where rustic coffee systems were predominant. These results suggest that deforestation occurred within coffee cultivation areas and point out the concurrent role of government subsidies and incentives through the PROCAFE program, launched in 2014, that promoted the replacement of traditional coffee trees by CLR-resistant hybrids. We study the dynamic effects of CLR and exploit the delayed launch of PROCAFE to try to disentangle the impact of the epidemic from that of the policy response. Our results emphasize the vulnerability of agroforestry systems to exogenous shocks and suggest that PROCAFE, as a short-term response to CLR, contributed to increasing deforestation and accelerating the transition of Mexican traditional coffee landscapes to monoculture.

Much of the developed world has adopted substantial, complex agricultural subsidy schemes in an attempt to produce desired rural livelihood and environmental outcomes. Understanding how farmers adjust their production activity in response to farm subsidies is crucial for setting optimal agricultural policy. Whereas standard economic theory suggests that farmers largely adjust production levels in response to prices and marginal subsidy rates, recent work in consumer behavior suggests that average (dis-)incentives may play a relevant role. We use a unique panel covering all farms applying for subsidies in Norway and a flexible deep-learning method to exploit kinks in the subsidy scheme to answer whether farmers respond more to average or marginal subsidies. In contrast to the standard economic theory of production, we find suggestive empirical evidence that farmers respond more to changes in average payments than to changes in marginal payments. We anticipate that our findings on the relevance of average payment levels for farmers' decision making may inspire further theoretical and empirical inquiries into agricultural policy effects. The study also highlights how novel deep-learning tools can be applied for detailed policy analysis and what advantages and challenges come with it. We believe that this approach has substantial potential for analysts and policymakers to evaluate and predict the impacts of policy options.

The paucity of data regarding patients with Serious Mental Illness (SMI) and cancer is alarming given the fact that people with SMI, especially schizophrenia, bipolar disorders and severe depressive disorders, have in general poorer access to physical health care and higher morbidity and mortality because of physical illnesses. The aims of this review were to examine the current evidence from existing literature on the risk of developing cancer and its course among people with SMI. Equivocal results emerge regarding the risk of developing some kind of cancer among people with SMI, with contrasting data on a possible higher, similar or lower risk in comparison with the general population. In contrast, a series of studies have pointed out that patients with SMI who develop cancer are less likely to receive standard levels of cancer care, both in terms of screening, diagnosis and treatment. Also, the mortality for cancer has been confirmed to be higher than the general population. A global sensitization about these problems is mandatory in an era in which community psychiatry has been developed in all countries and that policies of prevention, treatment, follow up, and palliative care should regard all the segments of the population, including people with SMI, through an interdisciplinary approach.

The global push for renewable energy must overcome the local challenge of convincing neighboring landowners to lease their properties for wind power. Is this challenge more or less pronounced in rural landscapes with small landholdings? Our theoretical model combines ideas from literatures on the commons, anticommons, and spatial externalities to explain conditions when small landholdings could promote or inhibit voluntary leasing. Empirically, we estimate the effects of landholding size and landscape fragmentation on wind farm uptake across rural areas of the United States over the past 20 years. Evidence from three spatial levels of analysis (counties, square-mile sections, and individual parcels) indicates that areas with more landowners have less installed wind capacity after controlling for windiness, access to transmission lines, and other relevant factors that vary across and within counties. The findings imply that fragmented ownership, which is an overlooked factor in studies of the feasibility of decarbonization, will pose an impediment to future wind expansion on private land as remaining areas without wind development become disproportionately fragmented.

Outdoor agricultural workers often work in harsh environmental conditions, including high temperatures and poor air quality. This paper studies how these factors impact worker productivity, which can have implications for worker health, well-being, and income as well as farm payroll, production, and profitability. Our analysis uses 6 years of payroll records of harvesters on two large farms combined with pollution and weather monitor data from multiple sources. We address simultaneity issues by exploring pollution measurements from nearby upwind and downwind monitors and incorporating an alternative PM_2.5 measure that better captures ambient or regional concentration. Across all specifications, results suggest that heightened concentrations of ground-level ozone and PM_2.5 are associated with reduced productivity. In our main specification, we find that one standard deviation increases in ozone and PM_2.5 are associated with reductions in productivity of 2% and 1.1%, respectively.

Many countries of the world have implemented subsidy programs to maintain a minimum amount of farm production especially for rice. Agricultural support programs usually cause significant fiscal burdens on government budgets. These programs can be generally categorized into decoupled and coupled programs, and one longstanding research interest of previous literature is whether these programs are decoupled or coupled with farm production practices. In Taiwan, a unique land direct payment (LDP) program to rice farms was implemented to ease severe financial burden of the price support program with government purchase. In contrast to production control programs imposing quantity restrictions on farm production, this program is voluntary for rice farms, and participants are paid at a fixed rate per hectare of farmland. This paper examines the impacts of this program on farm income and farm production practices in Taiwan. The causal effect of the program is identified based on the exogenous rollout of the policy across multiple times and areas. We construct a dataset linking nationally representative rice farm surveys over several years and administrative records on program recipients to estimate the local average treatment effect of the program. We find that the effect is 4% of farm income. In addition, program participants rely less on price support programs and produce less rice and use less fertilizer, pesticide, and machinery. Although the LDP reduces rice production, we find that it causes overall government spending on the price support and direct payment programs to increase by 8.7% after the LDP.

We estimate market power in California's surface water market. Market power may distort the potential welfare gains from water marketing. We use a Nash-Cournot model and derive a closed-form solution for the extent of market power in a water market setting. We then use this solution to estimate market power in a newly assembled dataset on California's water economy. We show that, under the assumptions of the Nash-Cournot model, market power in this thin market is limited.