https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14678276/2023/105/2
Presidential Address
A call for justice work in agricultural and applied economics
Norbert Lance Weston WilsonArticles
Outsourcing the dry season: Cattle ranchers' responses to weather shocks in the Brazilian Amazon
Sectoral wage gaps and gender in rural India†
On export duration puzzles
Wendkouni Jean-Baptiste Zongo, Bruno Larue, Carl GaignéUnemployment benefits, food insecurity, and supplemental nutrition assistance program spending
Wei Fu, Chen Huang, Feng LiuAssessing the affordability of nutrient-adequate diets
Kate R. Schneider, Luc Christiaensen, Patrick Webb, William A. MastersWas the trip worth it? Consistency between decision and experienced utility assessments of recreational nature visits
Tobias Börger, Anna Maccagnan, Mathew P. White, Lewis R. Elliott, Tim TaylorIncorporating historical weather information in crop insurance rating
The impacts of tropical storms on food prices: Evidence from China
Xiaojia Bao, Puyang Sun, Jianan LiEconomic impacts of food safety incidents in a modern supply chain: E. coli in the romaine lettuce industry
Ashley Spalding, Rachael E. Goodhue, Kristin Kiesel, Richard J. SextonThe Achilles heel of the U.S. food industries: Exposure to labor and upstream industries in the supply chain
Ahmad Zia Wahdat, Jayson L. LuskFarm labor supply and fruit and vegetable production
Zachariah Rutledge, Pierre MérelTrade uncorked: Genetic distance and taste-related barriers in wine trade
Olivier Bargain, Jean-Marie Cardebat, Raphaël ChiappiniHousing booms and H-2A agricultural guest worker employment
Marcelo Castillo, Diane Charlton
A call for justice work in agricultural and applied economics
Norbert Lance Weston WilsonAbstract: This presidential address calls the membership to explore ways of doing justice work in their research, teaching, extension, and outreach activities. By sharing my story and developing a content analysis of presidential addresses and invited papers published in the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association journals, I demonstrate how race has shaped my work and the need for additional work in this area. Through this example, I hope that members of the profession will find new inspiration to do justice work.Outsourcing the dry season: Cattle ranchers' responses to weather shocks in the Brazilian Amazon
Abstract: Livestock production plays a vital role in the global economy, yet little is known about how climate change will affect the industry. Studies of crop agriculture may not translate to livestock agriculture due to differences in the set of potential adaptation strategies. Ranchers' responses to changing weather and climate are particularly relevant in the Brazilian Amazon, where the dry season is increasing by as much as 0.6 days per year. A longer dry season increases production risks as animals may succumb to starvation, lack of water, or heat stress. I pair transaction data and weather shocks to show that ranchers strategically sold animals prior to the dry season, in response to two predictors of an extreme dry season: sporadic rainfall and high temperatures prior to the dry season. Ranchers sold animals for both fattening and slaughter in response to sporadic rainfall prior. Nearly half of animals initially sold for fattening were sold for slaughter 90 days later. In contrast, ranchers responded to high temperatures solely by selling for slaughter, suggesting that current on-farm technologies are insufficient to prevent losses from heat stress. The overall supply increased in years with sporadic rainfall and high temperatures, but the supply fell by a greater amount the following year. My results suggest that farmers are currently not fully insulated from the effects of a severe dry season. As severe dry seasons become more frequent, the industry will likely increasingly rely on feedlots and need additional methods to cope with heat stress.Sectoral wage gaps and gender in rural India†
Abstract: Using detailed monthly household panel data from rural India, I analyze sectoral wage gaps for men and women. I show that the wage gap across the non-farm and farm sectors is much higher for women than for men. Relative to men, women also work less time in non-farm wage employment than in farm wage employment. Taken together, these findings suggest that constraints are preventing women from reallocating their time to more remunerative wage employment opportunities. Women are less likely to work outside of their own village in the non-farm sector, yet the wage gap is driven by higher caste and married women. These results are consistent with a lack of local non-farm employment opportunities interacting with barriers to labor mobility for women but not men.On export duration puzzles
Wendkouni Jean-Baptiste Zongo, Bruno Larue, Carl GaignéAbstract: We investigate two puzzles in the export duration literature. The first puzzle has to do with the frequent entries and exits of firms in export markets, which are at odds with the large fixed export costs in such markets. We introduce convex production technologies in a trade model to show how variable marginal costs create direct linkages between export markets. As fixed export costs vary across destinations, more productive firms need not necessarily export to more destinations. Cost convexity implies that the probability of supplying a given export market is adversely affected by positive export shocks in other markets. This is supported by our empirical analysis of bilateral flows for over 200 agri-food products to 176 destinations originating from six large exporting countries. The second puzzle has to do with the paradoxical effect of tariffs reported in empirical export duration studies. When endogeneity is addressed, tariffs increase the probability of an export failure.Unemployment benefits, food insecurity, and supplemental nutrition assistance program spending
Wei Fu, Chen Huang, Feng LiuAbstract: This paper examines the effects of unemployment insurance (UI) expansions on household food insecurity in the United States using the Food Security Supplement to the Current Population Survey for 1999–2017. We exploit the plausibly exogenous variation in state maximum weekly UI benefits across states and over time. The two-part model demonstrates that a $100 increase in state weekly UI benefits reduces the likelihood of food insecurity among UI-eligible families by 5.6% and the severity of food insecurity conditional on being food insecure by 6.3%. We further present strong evidence of program substitution between UI and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which is the largest food assistance program with the stated goal of reducing food insecurity. Specifically, for every dollar spent on UI, 4–11 cents can be saved on SNAP, thereby reinforcing the social benefits of an UI expansion.Assessing the affordability of nutrient-adequate diets
Kate R. Schneider, Luc Christiaensen, Patrick Webb, William A. MastersAbstract: The cost and affordability of least-cost healthy diets by time and place are increasingly used as a proxy for access to nutrient-adequate diets. Recent work has focused on the nutrient requirements of individuals, although most food and antipoverty programs target whole households. This raises the question of how the cost of a nutrient-adequate diet can be measured for an entire household. This study identifies upper and lower bounds on the feasibility, cost, and affordability of meeting all household members' nutrient requirements using 2013–2017 survey data from Malawi. Findings show only a minority of households can afford the nutrient-adequate diet at either bound, with 20% of households able to afford the (upper bound) shared diets and 38% the individualized (lower bound) diets. Individualized diets are more frequently feasible with locally available foods (90% vs. 60% of the time) and exhibit more moderate seasonal fluctuation. To meet all members' needs, a shared diet requires a more nutrient-dense combination of foods that is more costly and exhibits more seasonality in diet cost than any one food group or the individualized diets. The findings further help adjudicate the extent to which nutritional behavioral change programs versus broader agricultural and food policies can be relied upon to improve individual access to healthy diets.Was the trip worth it? Consistency between decision and experienced utility assessments of recreational nature visits
Tobias Börger, Anna Maccagnan, Mathew P. White, Lewis R. Elliott, Tim TaylorAbstract: This paper assesses the relationship between decision utility and experienced utility of recreational nature visits. The former is measured as the travel cost to reach that site as routinely used by the travel cost method (TCM), and the latter is operationalized through visit-related subjective well-being (SWB). As such, the analysis is a test of convergent validity by examining whether ex ante TCM-based assessment of recreational value reflecting decision utility corresponds to stated ex post SWB, reflecting experienced utility. It explores to what extent utility revealed by counts of nature visits are associated with self-reported, visit-related SWB relating to that same visited site. The analysis uses two existing datasets providing information on (i) 3672 recreational visits to green/blue spaces in England over the course of four years and (ii) 5937 recreational visits to bluespace sites across 14 European countries over one year. Results show a positive association between travel cost and visit-related SWB while controlling for trip frequency and a large set of covariates, suggesting convergent validity of the two utility concepts. A breakdown by travel mode suggests this relationship only holds for trips involving motorized transport and is not present for habitual, chore-like walking visits to the recreational site.Incorporating historical weather information in crop insurance rating
Abstract: Crop insurance programs rely on conditional predictive distributions of loss random variables (e.g., yield, revenue, loss costs, etc.) to determine probabilities and magnitudes of loss. The loss variables may be related to stochastic variables that are not known at the time the policy is priced. Such is the case for weather; weather is stochastic, realizations are not known when the crop insurance policy is sold, and there is often additional historical information on weather relative to the loss variable itself. We provide a Bayesian methodology for incorporating historical weather information in crop insurance rating. We apply the method in empirical applications to county-level U.S. corn yields and loss cost ratios in the Midwest. The historical weather-conditioned distributions differ from those based on shorter samples. In the yield distribution setting, additional temporal weather information leads to economic gains relative to other rating approaches; the magnitude of these gains increases with the amount of historical weather information included in the analysis.The impacts of tropical storms on food prices: Evidence from China
Xiaojia Bao, Puyang Sun, Jianan LiAbstract: Climate change is a major source of external shocks to the economy. In this article, we estimate the short-term impacts of tropical storms on food prices. After matching the track records of tropical storms with retail prices of food products during 1998 and 2012 in China, we find that tropical storms lead to food prices increasing by 2.3%, and the effect lasts more than one month. The positive impacts on prices mainly concentrate on fresh vegetable products. One main channel of price increases caused by tropical storms is the supply-side shock to the transportation and distribution system. We find limited evidence of price increases driven by demand-side shocks such as food displacement and food composition changes. The impacts of tropical storms on food price increases lead to a total loss amounting to $92 million each year on average. This study contributes to literature evaluating the price impacts caused by tropical storms and provides policy implications on enhancing food supply resilience.Economic impacts of food safety incidents in a modern supply chain: E. coli in the romaine lettuce industry
Ashley Spalding, Rachael E. Goodhue, Kristin Kiesel, Richard J. SextonAbstract: Food-safety incidents disrupt impacted markets, cause destruction of edible product, shake consumer confidence, and impose economic losses upon participants across the implicated supply chain. Despite the prevalence of such incidents, we know surprisingly little about their supply chain impacts, especially in modern produce markets where contracts may impede the diffusion of price impacts through the supply chain. The November 2018 E. coli incident for romaine lettuce in Central California roiled North American produce markets throughout the fall of 2018 and well into 2019. Our study of the economic impacts of this incident benefited from access to disaggregate information on prices and sales for romaine and substitute leafy greens at all stages of the supply chain, enabling us to overcome data limitations that have impeded prior studies. We decompose impacts from the incident into price and quantity components. Romaine growers were largely protected from damage due to fixed-price provisions in grower-processor contracts. Economic losses were incurred mostly by romaine shippers and processors, and grocery retailers who pulled saleable product from the supply chain and lost sales during and well after the incident due to reduced consumer demand. We estimate that the total societal loss from the incident was in the range of $276–$343 million. Widespread and long-lasting impacts from a food-safety incident demonstrate the economic benefit of industries adopting mandatory food-safety standards and improved traceability to minimize the occurrence and impacts of such incidents.The Achilles heel of the U.S. food industries: Exposure to labor and upstream industries in the supply chain
Ahmad Zia Wahdat, Jayson L. LuskAbstract: The modern-day food industries are part of a complex agri-food supply chain, where food production has become efficient yet potentially vulnerable to supply chain risks. The COVID-19 pandemic is a testament to that end. This article measures and identifies the U.S. food manufacturing industries' vulnerability to upstream industries and labor occupations by (a) calculating a food industry's diversification of intermediate input purchases across upstream industries, (b) quantifying the relative exposure of food manufacturing in a given industry and location to upstream input suppliers and labor occupations, and (c) estimating each food industry's gross output elasticity of inputs. This article also explores geographic heterogeneity in food industries' vulnerability. Among our results, we find evidence that the animal processing industry's output is relatively vulnerable to production labor, consistent with the observed disruptions to the meatpacking sector during COVID-19, which were largely caused by labor issues. Our results may help academics and practitioners to understand food industries' vulnerabilities to upstream industries and labor occupations.Farm labor supply and fruit and vegetable production
Zachariah Rutledge, Pierre MérelAbstract: This study provides econometric estimates of the effects of reductions in farm labor supply on the production of hand-harvested fruits and vegetables. Using crop production and employment data from California counties, we estimate panel regressions linking farm employment to crop production outcomes. Because we exploit variation in equilibrium employment, as opposed to exogenous variation in the labor supply curve, we use an equilibrium displacement model to identify the most likely sources of estimation bias and conclude that our regression estimates should be interpreted as upper bounds for the effect of interest. Our results indicate that a 10% decrease in the farm labor supply (in terms of the number of workers) causes at most a 4.2% reduction in production in the top 10 fruit and vegetable producing counties. Production effects are channeled primarily through a reduction in harvested acreage, although we also uncover some effects on yield.Trade uncorked: Genetic distance and taste-related barriers in wine trade
Olivier Bargain, Jean-Marie Cardebat, Raphaël ChiappiniAbstract: A nascent literature explores the impact of taste differences on trade. In gravity model estimations, the coefficient on geographic distance is large because it tends to capture such (usually unobservable) preference-related frictions. We examine this question in the context of French wine, that is, a cultural good characterized by a great variety of types (i.e. accommodating a large heterogeneity in wine tastes) and of quality levels (from cheap table wine to the finest grands crus). A series of gravity models are estimated using the universe of French bottled wine exports by detailed appellation between 1998 and 2015. We use genetic distance as a proxy for taste differences inherited from biology and culture. We show that this interpretation is not ruled out by other possible roles of genetic distance on trade (i.e., microgeography or non-gustatory cultural dimensions such as trust). We find that genetic distance has an independent effect on trade, explaining between 20% and 40% of the coefficient on geographic distance. Dynamic estimates confirm this result and establish both the persistent and contemporaneous effects of genetic differences. A heterogeneous analysis also corroborates previous findings in the literature showing that high-tier goods tend to escape gravity. In addition, we find that premium wines escape the home bias associated with taste differences, possibly illustrating that luxury wines have become global iconic products purchased for status and investment motives rather than for gustatory pleasure.Housing booms and H-2A agricultural guest worker employment
Marcelo Castillo, Diane CharltonAbstract: This paper examines the effects of changes in housing demand on H-2A employment within commuting zones from 2001 to 2017. Agricultural employers who demonstrate that no workers in the domestic labor market are willing or able to perform a seasonal or temporary farm job can apply for certification to hire guest workers through the H-2A visa program. H-2A employment grew more than 450% between 2001 and 2019 from 45,000 to 258,000. This is one of the first papers to econometrically examine causal factors that contributed to the growth of H-2A employment. We find that a 1% increase in housing demand leads to a 0.40%–0.97% increase in H-2A employment. We also show suggestive evidence that changes in housing demand affect H-2A employment through shifts in the demand for workers in nonfarm industries that pull workers from the agricultural sector. Consistent with previous literature, we show that positive housing demand shocks lead to increased employment in construction and other nontradable sectors that traditionally hire immigrant workers. We also find positive effects of housing demand on local farm wages, consistent with an inward shift in the local farm labor supply during housing booms.
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