Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy最新文献

Within the Federal Crop Insurance Program (FCIP), prevented planting (PP) coverage provides payments for pre-planting costs associated with crops that ultimately cannot be planted due to adverse weather. PP indemnities, which are not considered production losses within the FCIP rating methodology, influence premium rates differently than typical losses. This study utilizes a panel data set consisting of approximately 77,697 county level observations from RMA's summary of business to identify the relationship between the prevalence of prevent plant use and a number of actuarial related outcomes. Overall, we find that increases in the share of total indemnities attributable to PP claims over the preceding 10 years produce generally negligible changes to loss ratios, but can significantly increase loss ratios among subsets of the FCIP that heavily utilize PP coverage (greater than 20% of total indemnities). This suggests that, despite loss ratios being robust to typical rates of PP claims, actuarial performance can degrade when PP payments are high relative to indemnities from all other perils. Additionally, a simulation is conducted in which prevent plant indemnities are counterfactually treated as production losses when pricing FCIP contracts as opposed to current practice of recovering prevent plant costs via a fixed rate load. Doing so suggests significant improvements in loss ratios for crops that have historically had high shares of prevent plant indemnities, however, these improvements come at the expense of higher premiums and reduced demand for crop insurance.

We investigate potential linkages between product and quality differentiation in the cheese markets and raw milk producer prices. We analyze the co-movements of producer prices of milk delivered to cheese processing channels with different differentiation strategies, namely industrial, artisanal, and artisanal cheese with geographical indications (GI) in the Swiss dairy market. We find that overall, product and quality differentiation in cheese markets helps milk producers achieve higher and more stable prices. Additional GI protection does not guarantee further enhancement of producer prices. Rather, its effectiveness may depend largely on the strength of GI protection and the governance of producer organizations.

The least developed agrarian countries often face an ironic situation where well-intentioned foreign aid adversely influences their economies. This study explores the unintended consequences of official development assistance (ODA) from donor countries on agricultural exports from recipient countries by appreciating their domestic exchange rates. Motivated by the fact that ODA accounts for a larger share of their total GDP, we first examine whether ODA inflows increase the real effective exchange rate of the recipient country. Leveraging data from 47 countries over the period 2001–2018, we find that ODA inflows lead to real exchange rate appreciation, particularly in recipient countries with floating exchange rate regimes that are more susceptible to exchange rate fluctuations. Moreover, our results reveal that ODA inflows decrease agricultural exports in low-income agrarian economies adopting floating exchange rate regimes. By taking a unique perspective of ODA as an inflow of foreign capital, this study highlights the importance of understanding the exchange rate regime and agricultural trade of the agrarian economy when providing international aid.

Transportation accounts for only 11% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the life cycle of food but dominates food system conversations. We use national data from the 2017 Commodity Flow Survey to explore the tension between transportation, environmental, and agri-food policies to understand the potential impact of the Electronic Logging Device (ELD) mandate on agri-food transportation. We estimate the change in transportation time and energy use resulting from the ELD mandate's efforts to better enforce existing transportation regulations. Our analysis finds that there will likely be an increase in resulting GHG emissions, which may alter the sustainability of on-road agri-food transportation.

Evidence suggests the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion may increase participation in other public programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. This study examines a potential mechanism behind these effects. Before the expansion, most states operated Integrated Eligibility Systems that managed enrollment processes for various public programs. In 2014, many states decoupled Medicaid from these platforms following Medicaid's new eligibility criteria. This research examines the impact of Medicaid expansion on integrated systems and SNAP participation, finding higher SNAP participation rates in states with uninterrupted Integrated Eligibility Systems compared to those that delinked their systems or never had such systems.

Given China's role as a dominant grain and oilseeds importer, any changes in Chinese policy can significantly affect exporting countries. We estimate how the domestic supply and demand factors determine China's grain and oilseed imports and project the impact on U.S. exports to China with changes in Chinese policies. The results indicate that China's policy on increasing domestic soybeans and corn production and decreasing meat consumption can considerably diminish the U.S. and its competitors' exports to China. The key policy implication is that the United States should actively seek out new export markets considering China's evolving supply and demand conditions.

India has a growing demand for high-value agricultural products due to rising incomes, urbanization, and consumer preferences. The United States is currently India's fifth-largest supplier of agricultural products. However, trade barriers restrict bilateral trade between these two nations, and both countries are evaluating the prospects for lowering trade restrictions and enhancing bilateral trade. We employ a gravity model to analyze the effects of trade policies on India-US bilateral trade and the potential implications for global agricultural trade. The results indicate that elimination of tariffs significantly boosts US exports to India and lowers Indian domestic prices, particularly for tree nuts, fresh fruit, and distilled spirits.

Ambitious pesticide policies aiming to reduce pesticide applications and risks have been introduced across Europe. Herbicides represent a major part of pesticide use, but the uptake of mechanical or agronomic alternatives remains low. We here explore underlying reasons and provide policy insights for supporting a transformation to herbicide-free production, accounting for both economic and agronomic drivers. We develop detailed extensions to an existing bio-economic modeling approach and use stochastic dominance analysis to assess the performance of non-chemical alternatives to herbicides under different production and market conditions exante. We apply our approach to Swiss wheat production and find that herbicide-free production is not viable without financial support, and thus requires additional per-hectare agri-environmental payments and price markups to be economically viable. We find that currently available support payments in Switzerland are sufficient in achieving economic viability of herbicide-free production. Moreover, we confirm the relevance of risk and risk preferences and identify a risk-reducing character of herbicide-free production systems with support payments. Our analysis provides insights on potential drivers, trade-offs, decision-making factors, and policies for a transition to non-chemical weed control.

Recognizing school meals as critical safety nets for children in low-income households, many states are passing legislation to adopt universal free school meals, linking their funding to the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), a federally funded universal free school meal program. However, about half of all eligible school districts did not participate in CEP in the school year 2018–2019. Using a policy diffusion approach and a Cox regression model, this research demonstrates the importance of a school district's identified student percentage (poverty level) and a state's direct certification rate (certifying students for free meals) in increasing the likelihood of CEP adoption.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections of USDA's mandatory farm and nutrition program outlays are important in shaping US agricultural policy. Using CBO projections and observed outcomes from 1985 through 2020, we examine the degree to which projections of farm, supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP), and child nutrition program outlays are unbiased, efficient, and informative. We find that projections for farm and child nutrition program outlays are unbiased, SNAP outlays are unbiased at short-term but are downward biased beyond a 3-year horizon. All three series of projections are inefficient. SNAP and child nutrition program outlay projections are informative up to a 5-year horizon, but the farm program outlay projections are informative for only a 1-year horizon. Disaggregated farm program data since 2008 suggests that the uninformativeness principally stems from conservation and commodity program projections. The findings may be valuable to CBO, as they continue to improve projections, and to projection users, in adjusting their expectations.