Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy最新文献

The food insecurity status of a household in the United States is generally put into the categories of food secure, low food secure, or very low food secure. Substantial differences in the level of need within categories are then ignored. In response, I establish a class of food insecurity measure using the binary measure of food insecurity combined with a measure of “dollars needed to be food secure.” Using data from the 2010 to 2021 Current Population Survey, I examine whether patterns of food insecurity differ by choice of measure. The two most notable findings are, first, that changes in food insecurity are similar across measures up until 2019 when they began to diverge and, second, that while aggregate rates fell from 2010 to 2021 under all measures, groups especially vulnerable to food insecurity saw smaller declines in the food insecurity rate and increases over other measures.

We examine cover crop (CC) adoption to determine how this soil health practice has influenced agricultural non-point source pollution. We use remotely sensed data on practice adoption, and control for hydrological flow direction, weather, and land use to estimate the ex post impact of CC on total Nitrogen concentrations in surface water while controlling for pollutant spillovers from upstream. At the mean treatment level in the study area (3.2%), a 1% increase in CC adoption results in a 0.06 mg/L (2%) reduction in concentration in the study area. Results provide novel estimates based on observed data that can be compared to biophysical simulations of CC effectiveness.

This paper examines the impact of participation in direct marketing on the entire distribution of farm sales for African American (AA) operations using the unconditional quantile regression (UQR) estimator. Our analysis yields unbiased estimates of the unconditional impact of direct marketing on farm sales and reveals the heterogeneous effects that occur across the distribution of farm sales. The sales gap for AA-led operations is about 11% across all quantiles when we control for farming and marketing experience along with key features of the farm operation such as crop choice and geographic location. The relative sales gap for AA operations declines across the distribution of farm sales and actually disappears for the largest operations. The network effect that we identify is associated with a sales premium for AA-led operations relative to other operations engaged in direct marketing. Marketing experts and extension professionals can use this information to guide farmers who are considering initiating or expanding direct marketing activities.

Farmers should increasingly adopt more water-efficient irrigation technologies—such as drip irrigation—as a result of climate warming and aggravating water scarcity. We analyze how Italian farmers adapt to climate change by changing their irrigation technology mix. We apply a two-stage econometric model to data from 5876 Italian farms. We find that farmers' initial reaction to increasing temperatures is reducing their surface-irrigated fractions. When temperatures increase further, farmers switch toward more sprinkler irrigation. Our results show that farmers are not autonomously moving to drip irrigation in response to climate change, suggesting that government incentives are needed to encourage this transition.

This article evaluates the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA) competitive grant funding awarded to predominately White 1862 land grant institutions (LGUs), historically Black 1890 LGUs, and non-land grant institutions. We present the historical distribution of funding for agricultural research. Much of the inquiry centers on the differential funding of the 1862 LGUs, 1890 LGUs, and non-land grant institutions. We discuss the implications for academic and community stakeholders. Results show that, on average, 1890 LGUs and non-land grant institutions receive less competitive grant funding than 1862 LGUs for the same award programs. We show that the disparity falls from 2010 to 2019.

The purpose of this paper is to comprehensively review the literature on the value and impact of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports and discuss theoretical issues and empirical evidence. Only a handful of studies provide direct estimates of the welfare benefits of USDA information using a rational expectations framework in storable commodity markets. Most studies examine partial evidence of welfare benefits associated with market response to USDA information. These studies include examinations of the impacts of USDA report releases on cash and futures price volatility and other market dynamics, impacts of report releases on options implied volatility, impacts of unanticipated information in USDA reports, as well as informational value, returns, and survey-based studies. We discuss the methodological and empirical contributions of these studies as well as their shortcomings and potential opportunities for future work.

Cover crops have many environmental benefits, including nutrient sequestering, soil health improvements, carbon dioxide removal, and biodiversity increases. Yet, farmers often do not receive enough benefits to warrant planting cover crops, particularly when they have no prior experience with managing cover crops. Therefore, public policies supporting cover crop use may be justified because of the positive externalities of cover crops are greater than the social cost of cover crop programs. Current Federal programs do not provide enough funding to elicit large cover crop use. We present a Federal program designed to increase cover crop use.

Vulnerable households, often the target for efforts to increase resilience, likely hold beliefs about their ability to control outcomes that make them less likely to invest in new technologies. Locus of control provides one way to elicit these beliefs and can help identify populations requiring additional support prior to widespread adoption of new technologies. This paper presents evidence from a large sample of maize-producing households in Mozambique and Tanzania. A more external locus of control is strongly associated with lower expected returns to improved maize varieties and a reduced probability of their adoption.

Many development programs rely on the idea that increasing profitability of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) could increase availability of nutritious foods among low-income consumers. We designed a randomized controlled trial in which we made a specific nutritious product produced by an SME exhaustively available in low-income local markets. We find that compared to control markets, consumers in treated markets purchased and consumed more of this product and less of competing brands with added sugar and fat. However, overall consumption for the product category was not increased and there was no change in the consumption of other related but potentially less nutritious foods. Our findings suggest the need for alternative policies to increase consumption of nutritious foods.

This paper discusses differences in the likelihood of loan default between Black and other farmers who took out USDA direct operating loans from 2011 to 2020. By controlling for financial, demographic, and other factors using a Cox proportional hazards model, we found that Black farmers have a higher incidence of default than other farmers. We advanced the research on the relative loan performance of different racial/ethnic minority groups, revealing heterogeneity in the likelihood of default that indicates using a single grouping for all minorities obscures important differences. There could be multiple contributing factors to higher rates of default among Black borrowers that deserve future attention and study, though it is beyond the scope of this paper to identify a causal mechanism.