Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy最新文献

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.

We examine the history of US land policy, with a focus on the Homestead Acts, underscoring the precarious position of African Americans during the homesteading period. We discuss the historical context and the shifting political landscape of the Civil War and Reconstruction era, providing the context for research on federal land policies and problems of race. Past research is almost entirely outside of the agricultural and applied economics profession. We believe that the applied economics discipline is especially suited for empirically examining the influence of federal land policies on past and present disparities and racial makeup of American agriculture.

This paper examines the effects of dollar store entry on independent grocery retailers in the United States between 2000 and 2019. We utilized an establishment-level dataset comprising all grocery retailers and dollar stores in the country. Our findings indicate that dollar store entry is associated with a 5.7% decrease in sales, a 3.7% reduction in employment, and a 2.3% rise in the likelihood of independent grocery retailers quitting the business. These adverse entry effects are three times larger in rural than urban areas. Event studies indicate that the negative impact on sales and employment disappears gradually in urban areas but persists in rural communities. We document differences in treatment effects of dollar store entry across regions, retail formats, and time.

This paper evaluates the impact of the Commodity Container Assistance Program on containerized agricultural exports from US ports. The program responded to logistical disruptions related to agricultural shipments from the ports of Oakland, Seattle, and Tacoma. Relying on counterfactual event study methods and detailed trade data, we find limited evidence of positive treatment effects after the program implementation. The average post-event trade effect is 1.0%, leading to limited agricultural export gains of about $18.6 million per month between March and September 2022. These findings suggest that while the program was cost-effective, it had limited success in facilitating US containerized agricultural exports.

USDA farm support programs have an established history of racial discrimination. Today, the Federal Crop Insurance Program is among the largest and most important programs available to U.S. farmers. Previous research has documented systematic misrating of crop insurance premiums with sizable welfare implications. In this paper, we explore whether producer race measured at the county level has explanatory power in a model of crop insurance misrating. We find that in some cases it does, raising concerns about the possibilities of racially discriminatory impacts of the RMA's rate-setting methodology. Further research is needed to isolate the mechanisms that explain our findings.