Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association最新文献

A key constraint to cassava productivity in Africa is the lack of adoption of improved cassava varieties tolerant to pests and diseases. To understand the drivers of adoption behavior, we examine the simultaneous adoption of improved cassava varieties and intercropping by 1200 smallholder farmers in Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda. Using a linear model, we find that varietal characteristics, such as yield and early maturity, are critical drivers of adoption. Access to extension and credit is associated with an increase in the attractiveness of yield-improving characteristics. We conclude that a more targeted extension approach would increase technology adoption in these countries.

Geographically weighted regression (GWR) has been presented as a valuable tool for estimating site-specific yield response functions to derive recommendations of variable rate input. This study employs Monte Carlo simulations to illustrate that if GWR assumes a quadratic yield response functional form while the actual yield-input relationship is quadratic-plateau, it can significantly overestimate the economic value of variable rate application compared to its true value. Practitioners in precision agriculture should exercise caution when utilizing GWR for site-specific input recommendations. Statistical community is also encouraged to develop tools in software packages providing GWR that allow more flexibility in functional form assumptions.

This study addresses how participation in the Federal crop insurance program influences agricultural loan delinquencies. To achieve this objective, we use 1994–2015 county-level panel data for corn production in the Midwestern United States (US). Traditional linear fixed effect (FE) models, instrumental variable-based FE estimation, and several robustness checks are used in the empirical analysis. Estimation results suggest that counties with higher levels of crop insurance participation tend to have statistically lower rates of agricultural loan delinquency. This is evidence that the US crop insurance program helps reduce financial stress and facilitates the continued viability of the agricultural credit system.

Most Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) research focuses on individuals who receive SNAP without examining the effects on the broader economy. We develop a general equilibrium model of the US economy to quantify SNAP's broader fiscal consequences. We find that SNAP expands the agricultural and food sectors by about 1% while slightly shrinking service sectors favored by higher income households. Effects on goods and factor prices are modest, with virtually no deadweight losses associated with the taxation needed to fund SNAP. SNAP improves the welfare of low-income recipient households by 4.9%, while having a negligible adverse effect on high-income households.

The objective of this study is to estimate the impact of a unilateral tariff waiver to Pakistan from the EU, intended as a relief package after the 2010 floods, on cotton exports and production in the country. We use the Synthetic Control Method and the Interactive Fixed Effects Counterfactual Estimator to assess the impact of the 2010 flood and the 2012 tariff waiver. Our findings suggest that the 2010 flood in Pakistan and the subsequent 2012 tariff waiver had limited impacts on cotton exports and production in Pakistan.

Pesticide resistance poses an increasing challenge for agricultural sustainability. Pesticide susceptibility is a depletable biological resource, but resistance management rarely quantifies marginal, forward-looking economic costs to users of depletion. To facilitate the development of such costs, we use a generic stochastic bioeconomic model of resistance evolution in a crop pest population, stochastic dynamic programming, and global sensitivity analysis to analyze the “marginal user costs” of resistance. The most impactful parameters are population density dependence and pesticide prices. The least impactful is the fitness cost of resistance, which is noteworthy because of prior emphasis on this parameter in the resistance management literature.

Recent evidence indicates that end-users of US soybeans are placing additional quality specifications in their contracts that are outside those covered by the official USDA grades and standards (such as protein and essential amino acid [EAA] content). This has led some industry groups to publish additional quality data on an annual basis. Using a 14-year panel data set from North Dakota, this study examines whether the release of quality data has an impact on the basis for soybeans at origins. The regression results strongly support the hypothesis that the additional EAA data had a statistically significant impact upon origin basis.

We examined how the unprecedented rise in freight rates in 2021 affected US containerized agricultural trade. We considered alternative measures of trade (value, volume, container numbers), as well as product, port, and partner-country characteristics, and conducted separate analyses for exports and imports. Overall, we find that shipping costs have a substantial trade-reducing effect. On average, 10% higher shipping costs reduce US agricultural export values by 0.58% and import values by 1.72%. For exports, we find a significant negative impact for several product categories. Our results suggest that policies addressing port congestion and shipping rate issues will have heterogenous outcomes.

Floods can severely disrupt agricultural activities. When these activities are part of production chains, domino effects can occur. We use agent-based modeling to simulate the production dynamics of a French cooperative winery as an example of a production chain, adopting a dual individual-collective perspective. The cash-flow analysis shows that there are nonexplicit mechanisms in the cooperative organization that allow the propagation of flood impacts throughout the chain and influence the winegrowers' ability to cope, thus threatening the continuity of the winegrowers' activity and the cooperative winery itself.