American Journal of Agricultural Economics最新文献

Harnessing farm-level fluctuations in weather over time, we investigate the impact of extreme heat on farm-level agricultural productivity and adaptation strategies in Nigeria. We employ data from the Nigeria Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) from the years 2010, 2012, and 2015. Our findings show that although current high temperatures decrease crop yields, the overall agricultural output value is not affected by high temperatures, primarily due to increments in the area under cultivation. Our analysis also reveals that farmers re-allocate farm inputs in the face of high temperatures. Specifically, farmers shift from productivity boosting inputs, like fertilizers, to protective measures such as pesticides. This is accompanied by a greater dependence on hired labor after experiencing high temperatures in the previous year. Additionally, we find an increase in the adoption of mixed-cropping practices as a response to the high temperatures in the current season, indicating differential effects of high temperatures on crop production decisions. These insights highlight the importance of considering farm-level adaptive behaviors in policymaking, especially in initiatives aimed at increasing the use of specific inputs, as high temperatures can undermine such policy goals.

Droughts can dramatically affect economic activities, especially in developing countries where more than half the labor force is in the agricultural sector. This paper highlights the causal impact of drought on income inequality using a new methodology known as the quantile treatment effect on the treated under the copula stability assumption. This method generalizes the difference-in-differences framework to the entire distribution. The methodology is applied to a geo-referenced and nationally representative household survey of two sub-Saharan African countries: Ethiopia and Malawi. The results show that droughts worsen income inequality in both countries. Lower income quantiles are subject to a higher decrease in per capita income, up to 40% for the lowest income quantile. In contrast, higher income quantiles are largely unaffected or appear to benefit from the drought. These results are robust to several specifications and offer quantitative insights into how extreme weather conditions affect inequality dynamics in developing countries. Inequality formation is driven by differences in the ability to cope with droughts. The results show that wealthier households have a higher capacity to find alternative sources of income to prevent a welfare drop. In contrast, the most vulnerable households, particularly those that are low in assets, remote, or headed by women or older individuals, are most seriously harmed. Finally, consumption-smoothing behaviors and asset depletion strategies in middle income households are also observed.

Rising temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns threaten agricultural yields in many key global production regions. This paper assesses the impact of growing-season extreme weather events on agricultural export outcomes in the short run, as well as the association between agricultural exports and long-run climate expectations and variance. Our analysis matches information on bilateral trade flows with high-resolution, geospatial data on growing area, planting and harvest dates, and weather for three highly traded staple crops—maize, soybeans, and rice—which together account for almost half of global calorie consumption. We use an econometric gravity model to estimate the short-run effects of weather volatility and a nonparametric series regression to infer long-run climate-export associations. We then use our estimates to simulate the effects of various climate and weather counterfactuals on the agricultural export landscape. We find that 2-standard-deviation extreme weather events (measured using the water balance deficit) reduce maize, rice, and soybean bilateral export values by 48.2%, 53.4%, and 21.7%, respectively. Our long-run results imply that increases in the standard deviation of weather are associated with lower export values across all three crops. An increase in the frequency of extreme events has the potential to greatly shift current commodity export patterns. Understanding these shifting patterns of trade is necessary to implement trade policy that enables countries to leverage their evolving comparative advantages and ensure the effectiveness of trade as a tool mitigating the negative production effect of climate change.

Crop insurance is delivered to farmers and ranchers through a partnership among the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC), part of the United States Department of Agriculture, and the crop insurance industry. The FCIC offers financial incentives, through reinsurance and subsidies, to private insurance companies for insurance contracts sold in accordance with the Standard Reinsurance Agreement (SRA). Crop insurance agents play an important role in the delivery of the federal crop insurance program, acting as intermediaries between farmers and crop insurance companies. Little is understood about the supply of crop insurance agents and the role of government policy in the provision of agent services, particularly after the 2010 SRA. We model the equilibrium supply of crop insurance agents to derive testable hypotheses about the factors that influence agent concentration across space. We evaluate our model using spatial econometric techniques and a novel dataset of crop insurance agent locations by county. Generally, forces that raise agent compensation, including the degree of competition among insurance companies, are shown to increase the local supply of agents. Results vary by government-defined reinsurance regions. Notably, historical average premium rates, which both reflect actuarial risk and influence farmer insurance demand, are negatively related to agent competition in the low-risk Group 1 states, which contributes over 40% of insured liabilities. These factors produce spatial spillovers, suggesting the presence of agglomeration effects in the market for agent services. Proposed changes to the SRA should consider impacts on the regional distribution and local supply of agents.

The absence of an incentive-compatible mechanism to reveal consumers' true willingness to pay in stated preference elicitation methods and the consequent hypothetical bias are an important concern in discrete choice experiments. Our study extends this discourse on hypothetical bias by examining how it varies with the heterogeneity in respondents' cognitive ability and familiarity with a good. This paper also adds to our understanding of the demand for agricultural insurance in developing countries by studying the willingness to pay for one of the world's largest agricultural insurance programs using a large state representative sample. Following a between-subject design, we implemented a large scale randomized incentivized choice experiment and hypothetical choice experiment with real farmers who make decisions on the purchase of insurance. We find that demand for an insurance product is shaped by the subject's familiarity with and cognitive ability to understand the product. We show that the magnitude of the hypothetical bias is higher at a lower level of cognitive ability and that bias diminishes with an increase in cognitive ability. Finally, we examine key heterogeneity and test a number of possible mechanisms.

I present new evidence of the effects of climate shocks on conflict. Focusing on political violence in Africa, I find that El Niño Southern Oscillation shocks during the crop-growing season affect harvest-related conflict in croplands exposed to this climate phenomenon. Specifically, a 1°C warming of sea surface temperature in the tropical Pacific Ocean, a proxy for a moderate-strength El Niño event, reduces political violence in exposed locations with crop agriculture, relative to other areas, by approximately 3%, during the early postharvest season. This effect attenuates toward zero as the crop year progresses. This effect can reach as much as 15% after a strong El Niño event, such as that of 1997 or 2015, in highly exposed croplands, such as parts of Southern Africa and the Sahel. Conversely, a La Niña event, which is a counterpart of an El Niño event, has the opposite effect and thus increases conflict in the exposed croplands during the early postharvest season. Because these events can be predicted several months in advance, the findings of this research can contribute to creating a platform for early warnings about transitory spatiotemporal shifts in political violence in predominantly agrarian societies.

Financial assistance for cover cropping through the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) has increased more than twentyfold in the past decade and a half. Available support for cover cropping increased further due to the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides significant funding for climate smart practices. In this study, we examine whether increases in available financial assistance lead to significant increases in producer participation in EQIP for cover cropping and whether these increases are additional on the landscape. We focus on the impacts of the National Water Quality Initiative (NWQI), which provides funding for cover crops and several other practices to producers in targeted watersheds on top of normal EQIP levels. We first estimate the impacts of NWQI on enrollment in EQIP using a watershed-level panel of acres enrolled in EQIP for cover crops. We find that NWQI more than triples EQIP cover crop acreage compared to similar control watersheds. Driving the increase in enrolled acreage is a small increase in the share of applications receiving a contract, as well as a significant increase in the total number of applications received. We then utilize field-level administrative data on cover cropping to estimate the impact of NWQI on cover crop adoption overall. We find evidence that the impacts of NWQI on cover cropping are largely additional.

Export-oriented industrialization was central to many Asian countries' structural transformation processes, but many African countries are bypassing industrialization, and the prospects for competing in global manufacturing markets are poor. Alternative structural transformation pathways all rely on domestic markets, and thus understanding their trajectories requires uncovering consumer preferences. Using detailed household expenditures data from a nationally representative panel survey in Tanzania, I estimate a flexible, stylized consumer demand system. I recover estimates of expenditure elasticities of demand for goods, services, and food in the aggregate, along with price elasticities of demand, identified using within-household variation in prices and expenditures. I find that, across the expenditures distribution and in both rural and urban areas, consumer preferences are service facing. In particular, I show that (1) consumers sharply increase spending on services relative to goods and food as incomes increase; (2) demand for services in the aggregate is somewhat sensitive to changes in service prices; and (3) food, goods, and services are substitutes for each other. On one hand, a high propensity to consume the types of services that generate large local economic growth multipliers is consistent with driving growth in service sector employment. However, sustained growth in the long run may be limited because these services are low productivity and nontradable, and domestic markets are size constrained.