American Journal of Agricultural Economics最新文献

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.

We show that weather shocks affect government trade policy decisions. We exploit variation in rainfall during the growing season within and across countries to show that weather shocks impact agricultural output and trade. Using information on tariff cuts by commodity from preferential trade agreements signed between 1995 and 2014, we then show that weather shocks that happen during the negotiation period correlate strongly with the size of tariff cuts. When weather shocks increase (decrease) a country's capacity to produce a given crop, its government negotiates a smaller (larger) tariff cut. These results are consistent with a political economy trade model with sector-specific inputs in which the government places more weight on producers relative to consumers in its objective function. They also reveal that governments update their beliefs about domestic agricultural production capacity in response to weather shocks.

A systematic component of wine quality is believed to depend on the geoclimatic factors of its production conditions. This belief has long motivated the development of geographical indications for wines. American viticulture areas (AVAs) represent the most common geographic identifier firms use to differentiate their products in the United States. In this paper we contribute new empirical evidence on the effectiveness and impact of GIs by studying consumers' valuation of US wine appellations within a structural model of wine demand. The model is rooted in the discrete-choice framework, under the basic premise that observable information concerning wine attributes is credible and key to consumers' choices. Specifically, we develop a two-level, nested-logit model featuring many wine products and characteristics—including wine type, brands, and varietals, in addition to geographic origin. The model is estimated using NielsenIQ Consumer Panel data over the 2007–2019 period. We find that US consumers place a relatively high value on wines' geographic origins, distinct from the value of brand and varietal information, as documented by their marginal willingness to pay estimates. Furthermore, a counterfactual experiment shows significant welfare impacts from information about the geographic origin of wines. Over the period of interest, the welfare gain attributable to US geographic origin designation is estimated at about $5.37 billion, with wine producers and retailers capturing ~78% of this surplus. Virtually all consumer welfare gains are due to product differentiation and increased product variety enabled by information about the wine's origin.

Farm succession is a central issue in agricultural policy. Yet although many studies explore succession planning, little is known about how farms are actually transferred. We provide the first population-level evidence on intergenerational farm succession by linking US census records for millions of farmers' children in 1900 and 1910 to identify which children own and operate the family farm up to 40 years later. We first show that daughters are rarely successors. Using a within-family identification strategy, we find that first-born sons are slightly more likely than their younger brothers to be successors while their parents are working aged. However, birth order is not predictive of who receives the farm when parents are older or deceased. For later farm transfers, sons who were previously tenant farmers are much more likely than their brothers to be successors, possibly because they are better prepared. Fewer than one-fifth of farmers transfer their farm to any son. Our study relies on rich historical data because current policy prevents the necessary data linkages for studying intergenerational farm succession. Providing a secure system for researchers to link modern agricultural data to population microdata, similar to what has been achieved with other data sources, would yield crucial insights into long-term agricultural policy issues in the US.

We study farmer responses in rice production and consumption to China's cadmium-contaminated rice (CCR) event in 2013. We show that the CCR event reduced both rice production and consumption but did not significantly affect the quantity and price of rice sold by farmers in areas affected by cadmium pollution. Households with young children reduced their rice production and consumption by a larger amount than others, whereas the responses are reversed for households with elderly people. The decrease in rice production was mainly driven by the decrease in farmers' consumption of self-produced rice instead of through price or income channels, indicating that farmers are prosumers who make production decisions not purely to maximize profit but also to satisfy their own consumption needs. Farmers being prosumers helped promote production side responses to new information about food safety.

There is limited empirical evidence on the value of formal property rights to natural resources when they are not transferable, and there is regulatory uncertainty about enforcement. This paper takes a hedonic approach to understanding how three core features of groundwater property rights—access, allocation, and seniority—are capitalized into agricultural land values in the High Plains Aquifer region of Kansas. We find that groundwater access rights confer an average land value premium of 71%, or $1445/acre in 2019 dollars. Water rights having larger allocations and more seniority are more highly valued in the land market. The seniority effect is small but is consistent with more junior rights facing greater regulatory risk of curtailment. Taken together, these results suggest that the land market capitalizes constraints to groundwater pumping provided by groundwater property rights. We use our empirical estimates to quantify the distributional costs of modifying existing patterns of pumping, a common challenge of groundwater management organizations seeking to improve the sustainability of extraction.

Regulations on the production and consumption of goods are very heterogeneous across countries. Whereas the effects of regulations on exports are well known, the responses of importers to heterogeneous and frequently changing country-specific regulations are not well understood. We combine Swiss firm-level import customs transaction data with country-product-year-specific maximum residue limits to investigate the effect of pesticide regulatory heterogeneity on firm-level imports and assess the moderating role of firm size and global value chain participation. Relying on a global sourcing model, we find that regulatory heterogeneity reduces imports but less so in larger and diversified firms. Participating in global value chains also improves firms' flexibility toward heterogeneous regulation. Business diversification—although reducing the gains from trade and scale—could help firms cope with heterogeneous international regulations.

We study how temporary provision of an agricultural innovation at zero cost affects long-run demand for that innovation. Our experimental design enables us to distinguish between an “anchoring effect” of subsidies and a “learning effect.” We document large and persistent anchoring and learning effects. For the innovation that we consider, an integrated pest management (IPM) package for Ethiopian smallholder farmers, the learning effect dominates the anchoring effect, so temporary subsidized provision promotes long-run technology diffusion.

This study evaluates the impact of China's fourth round of the poverty alleviation program, which targeted 14 contiguous destitute areas containing 680 counties and a population of 240 million. From 2012 to 2019, China allocated a total of 813.6 billion yuan (US$126.1 billion), primarily to economic development programs within these 14 areas. Using county-level data from 2006 to 2019, our difference-in-differences and difference-in-discontinuities estimates suggest that the program increased GDP per capita in the 14 areas by over 45% from 2012 to 2019, with substantial gains observed in both the agricultural and nonagricultural sectors. Our preferred estimates suggest that the rate of return to the program ranged from 155.8% to 165.8%. Using data from over 14,500 rural households from 2006 to 2015, we find that the program significantly elevated rural income and reduced rural poverty. Although the income growth of extremely poor households was driven more by agricultural income growth, the income growth of relatively poor households primarily resulted from nonagricultural sources.