Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy最新文献

Extreme swings in food prices can put food security at risk. Fertilizer prices are among the main drivers of food prices. This work explores the recurrent behavior of the extreme global fertilizer price fluctuations underlying food price dynamics. Extreme fertilizer price fluctuations show up every few years when located in the 10% tails and up to every few decades in the 0.1% tails of the distribution. For most global fertilizer prices, no significant differences are detected between the durations of recurring extreme peak-peak and trough-trough fluctuations, on the one hand, and the durations and amplitudes of booms and busts, on the other. Extreme global fertilizer price fluctuations co-move, showing in most cases higher phase concordance during recent periods of global turbulence. This allows policy makers to exploit reference extreme fluctuations as a benchmark to design and implement more homogeneous policies targeting global fertilizer prices.

We quantify the impact of soybean oil-based biodiesel production on US cropland, using a method that accounts for the intermediate effect of soybean crushing facilities. Based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data for biodiesel production and proprietary data for soybean crushing facilities over 2011–2020, we find that the elasticities of soybean acreage and total cropland acreage with respect to soybean oil-based biodiesel production are 0.011 and 0.002, respectively. The direct land-use effect of soybean oil-based biodiesel is about 0.96 million acres of cropland expansion per billion gallons, about twice as high as some estimates for corn ethanol from previous studies.

How much do non-tariff measures (NTMs) affect U.S. agricultural exports? While countries maintain a large and diverse set of NTMs to safeguard the health of plants, animals, and humans, policymakers and regulatory bodies may neglect the impact these measures have on international trade. This paper evaluates the impact of two broad types of NTMs important to U.S. food and agricultural exports: sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures and technical barriers to trade (TBTs). We construct a new database detailing the more prominent SPS and TBT measures impacting U.S. exports as highlighted in the Office of the United States Trade Representative's (USTR) National Trade Estimate (NTE) report from 2007 to 2021. Using a theoretically consistent gravity equation, we find that SPS and TBT measures reduce U.S. agricultural exports by 34.5%, on average, equivalent to a 16.4% ad valorem tariff. However, we find little evidence that these NTMs significantly affect the probability of U.S. exports or export survival in destination markets (i.e., the probability of export failure) suggesting that these measures primarily impact variable trade costs and the intensive margin of trade.

Despite the potential for hybrid rice varieties to increase yields, their adoption rates among Bangladeshi smallholders remain low. Most farmers prefer suboptimal inbred high-yielding or local rice varieties. Using a rich panel dataset from Bangladesh, this study tests the comparative advantage hypothesis—whether heterogeneous returns from adopting hybrid rice varieties explain slower diffusion among rice farmers. The findings reveal that hybrid rice varieties exhibit about 30% higher average returns than non-hybrids, and returns exceeding 70% accrue to only a small subset of farmers based on their comparative advantage. In contrast, many other farmers experience minimal or negative returns from adopting hybrid rice varieties. The findings show no comparative advantage in transitioning from local to high-yielding varieties (HYV), suggesting returns to HYV adoption are more uniform across farmers. Findings from this study confirm that adoption decisions are well-explained based on individual returns to available technology.

In this paper, we examine the impact of reducing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on grocery purchases using data from Circana. We use an imputed difference-in-difference model to exploit state-level variation in decisions to remove pandemic-era SNAP emergency allotments to estimate the impact of such policies. We find that SNAP households respond to the removal of SNAP emergency allotments by reducing their grocery expenditures by 4.6% on average and by putting 24.1% more of their grocery bills on credit cards. These results hold for SNAP participants headed by Black and White individuals and for households with children.

Nitrogen fertilizer prices have been volatile, especially in recent years. This study decomposes nitrogen price changes into structural shocks related to supply and demand via a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model and quantifies the relative contributions of these shocks to price movements over recent decades. Our findings reveal that corn and natural gas prices account for only a fraction of ammonia price fluctuations, while other factors in the nitrogen market have a more substantial influence.

This paper investigates the labor market impacts of the Green Revolution (GR) in Bangladesh using newly digitized subdistrict-level data from the 1970s to the 2000s. I use a panel fixed-effects model and find heterogeneous impacts on agricultural labor markets based on the labor intensity of different rice types—Boro, Aus, and Aman. HYV adoption reduced agricultural labor share by up to 6%, with Aman displacing more labor due to mechanized transplanting, while Boro remained labor-intensive due to irrigation needs. Despite productivity gains, there is no corresponding rise in nonagricultural employment or industrialization, and in some cases, rural unemployment increased. To address endogeneity, I use an instrumental variable based on groundwater constraints. These findings highlight the need for policies addressing labor market disruptions amid technological change.

Conservation easements have become an increasingly popular tool for safeguarding agricultural land from development. To the extent that capitalized future development returns embodied in the value of farmland are illiquid or inaccessible to the landowner for farm financing purposes, easements may also promote on-farm investment. In this paper, we conduct an observational empirical study of the association between county-level easement activity and various farm investment outcomes. We first document a robust and negative within-state correlation between farmland debt-to-asset ratio and two measures of urban pressure. This is consistent with our premise that capitalized future net returns to development are illiquid for farm-related loan collateral purposes. In the primary analysis, we consider the relationships between easement activity and investment outcomes concerning land tenure and ownership, borrowing behavior, machinery use, and labor use. County-level panel regression results suggest that past easement activity is associated with greater land ownership, tractor use, and, to a lesser extent, labor use. We do not find evidence for easements having a distinguishable relationship with borrowing behavior. Overall, our results provide descriptive evidence suggesting that easements may promote on-farm investment, a finding that aligns with previous survey work on this topic.