modeling skewness with the linear stochastic plateau model to determine optimal nitrogen rates accurate modeling of skewness is needed to increase the actuarial fairness of crop insurance we test day s conjecture that crop yield skewness becomes negative as nitrogen rates increase and determine how well a linear response stochastic plateau lrsp production function matches the pattern of observed skewness using four long term nitrogen experiments stillwater wheat is consistent with day s conjecture but the skewness for lahoma and altus wheat yields as well as altus cotton yields are not the lrsp assumes normal random effects and can explain only a small part of observed skewness so a new lrsp with skew normal random effects is introduced which comes closer to explaining the observed skewness and should increase the accuracy of nitrogen rate recommendations negative skewness reduced optimal nitrogen rates and positive skewness increased optimal nitrogen rates

licensing effect in consumer choice abstract most choices in the real world follow other choices or judgments the authors show that a prior choice which activates and boosts a positive self concept subsequently licenses the choice of a more self indulgent option the authors propose that licensing can operate by committing to a virtuous act in a preceding choice which reduces negative self attributions associated with the purchase of relative luxuries five studies demonstrate the proposed licensing effect of a prior commitment to a virtuous act on subsequent choice consistent with the authors theory the preference for an indulgent option diminishes if the licensing task is attributed to an external motivation the authors also report a mediation analysis in support of their theoretical explanation that the licensing effect operates by providing a temporary boost in the relevant self concept

vicarious goal fulfillment when the mere presence of a healthy option leads to an ironically indulgent decision this research examines how consumers food choices differ when healthy items are included in a choice set compared with when they are not available results demonstrate that individuals are ironically more likely to make indulgent food choices when a healthy item is available compared to when it is not available the influence of the healthy item on indulgent choice is stronger for those with higher levels of self control support is found for a goal activation based explanation for these findings whereby the mere presence of the healthy food option vicariously fulfills nutrition related goals and provides consumers with a license to indulge

political cleavages and changing exposure to trade combining the classical theorem of stolper and samuelson with a model of politics derived from becker leads to the conclusion that exogenous changes in the risks or costs of countries external trade will stimulate domestic conflict between owners of locally scarce and locally abundant factors a traditional three factor model then predicts quite specific coalitions and cleavages among owners of land labor and capital depending only on the given country s level of economic development and its land labor ratio a preliminary survey of historical periods of expanding and contracting trade and of such specific cases as the german marriage of iron and rye u s and latin american populism and asian socialism suggests the accuracy of this hypothesis while the importance of such other factors as cultural divisions and political inheritance cannot be denied the role of exogenous changes in the risks and costs of trade deserves further investigation

the role of copulas in the housing crisis abstract due to its simplicity and familiarity the gaussian copula is popular in calculating risk in collaterized debt obligations but it imposes asymptotic independence such that extreme events appear to be unrelated this restriction might be innocuous in normal times but during extreme events such as the housing crisis the gaussian copula might be inappropriate this paper explores various copula specifications and finds that the degree to which housing prices are related based on the gaussian copula is too small compared with real housing price data

selection and influence interest groups and congressional voting on trade policy studies of the effects of interest groups on congressional roll call voting typically view party and ideology as competing factors and rely on a factoral model of interests or a sectoral model including only interest groups with a direct stake in the vote we depart from that strategy in several ways we define interest groups at the level of standard industrial classification two digit codes and observe the universe of interests for 1979 90 we use measures of geographically and nongeographically based economic interests to estimate the representative s party and ideology we also consider the factor endowments of individuals within a district to examine their impact on floor votes we then investigate the influence of these interests on members party affiliation and ideology as well as a pool of five floor votes on foreign trade using instrumental variables for party and ideology economic interests account for a substantial portion of the variance in all cases and models that also include other explanatory variables are highly accurate in estimating floor votes

constituent interest vs legislator ideology the role of political opportunity cost this paper applies the economic model of legislative voting to the automobile industry domestic content vote in the u s house of representatives in 1982 we consider constituent interests for and against the ml and compare the predictive powers of alternative indicators of ideological preferences we also examine the role of political opportunity cost and find that lame ducks were significantly less likely to vote for the bill than were returnees to congress given the political advantages of voting for the bill this is consistent with the view that legislators were influenced by the case for freer trade

heterogeneity and distributional form of farm level yields representing farm level crop yield heterogeneity and distributional form is critical for risk and crop insuranceresearch moststudieshaveusedcountydata understatingbothsystematicandrandomvariation comparison of systematic versus random intra county variation is lacking few studies compare the various distributional forms that have been proposed this study utilizes the extensive potential of government farm level crop insurance data results show that systematic intra county variation is surprisingly strong a newly applied reverse lognormal distribution is preferred when county wide variation is removed but the normal distribution fits surprisingly well in the crop insurance relevant percentiles when county wide variation is not removed representing and accounting for both spatial and temporal heterogeneity is a major problem in agricultural economics and policy analysis due to the fact that most data are aggregated to at least the county level e g gardner and kramer 1986 just and pope 1999 both systematic and random components of crop yields are major factors in intra county farm level heterogeneity that are critical for modeling risk producer behavior and crop insurance participation most studies have either used aggregate at least county level data or relied on relatively few farm level observations the former makes results primarily illustrative while the latter limits statistical significance this article characterizes intra county crop yield heterogeneity both spatially and temporally with the most extensive dataset utilized to date and evaluates a broader set of parametric distributional possibilities than previously

crop yield skewness under law of the minimum technology no satisfactory motivation has been forwarded in favor of any crop yield distribution including the normal this article explores the foundations of yield distributions for the law of the minimum resource constraint technology at the plot level of analysis with independent identical uniform resource availability distributions the yield skew is positive whereas it is negative whenever the distributions are normal simulations show how asymmetries in resource availabilities determine skewness it is suggested that a negative yield skew occurs whenever production is tightly controlled so that the left tails of some resources availabilities distributions are thin irrigation may increase yield skewness copyright 2009 oxford university press

for better or for worse empirical evidence of moral licensing in a behavioral energy conservation campaign isolated environmental campaigns focusing on defined target behaviors are rolled out to millions of households every year yet it is still unclear whether these programs trigger cross domain adoption of additional environment friendly behaviors positive spillover or reduced engagement elsewhere a thorough evaluation of the real net performance of these programs is lacking this paper investigates whether positive or perverse side effects dominate by exemplifying the impact of a water conservation campaign on electricity consumption the study draws on daily water 10 780 data points and weekly electricity 1386 data points consumption data of 154 apartments in a controlled field experiment at a multifamily residence the results show that residents who received weekly feedback on their water consumption lowered their water use 6 0 on average but at the same time increased their electricity consumption by 5 6 compared with control subjects income effects can be excluded while follow up research is needed on the precise mechanism of the psychological process at work the findings are consistent with the concept of moral licensing which can more than offset the benefits of focused energy efficiency campaigns at least in the short term we advocate the adoption of a more comprehensive view in environmental program design evaluation in order to quantify and mitigate these unintended effects

geography of crop yield skewness analysis of crop yield distributions provides insights into better understanding how natural resources shape agricultural productivity this study seeks to provide a rigorous theoretical and empirical understanding of the effects of exogenous geographic and climatic factors on the first three moments of crop yields with focus on the third moment we hypothesize that exogenous factors having beneficial effects on crop production should make crop yield distributions less positively or more negatively skewed we employ a large crop insurance data set for corn soybean and wheat to find general support for our natural resources determines skewness hypothesis the proposed statistical method optimally uses correlations between the first three moments it significantly improves estimation performance over existing methods including the linear moment model which has been commonly applied in the literature

copula based models of systemic risk in u s agriculture implications for crop insurance and reinsurance contracts the federal crop insurance program has been a major fixture of u s agricultural policy since the 1930s and continues to grow in size and importance indeed it now represents the most prominent farm policy instrument accounting for more government spending than any other farm commodity program the 2014 farm bill further expanded the crop insurance program and introduced a number of new county level revenue insurance plans in 2013 over 123 billion in crop value was insured under the program crop revenue insurance first introduced in the 1990s now accounts for nearly 70 of the total liability in the program the available plans cover losses that result from a revenue shortfall that can be triggered by multiple dependent sources of risk either low prices low yields or a combination of both the actuarial practices currently applied when rating these plans essentially involve the application of a gaussian copula model to the pricing of dependent risks we evaluate the suitability of this assumption by considering a number of alternative copula models in particular we use combinations of pair wise copulas of conditional distributions to model multiple sources of risk we find that this approach is generally preferred by model fitting criteria in the applications considered here we demonstrate that alternative approaches to modeling dependencies in a portfolio of risks may have significant implications for premium rates in crop insurance

testing day s conjecture that more nitrogen decreases crop yield skewness whilecontroversysurroundsskewnessattributesoftypicalyielddistributions abetterunderstandingis importantforagriculturalpolicyassessmentandforcrop insuranceratesetting day 1965 conjectured that crop yield skewness declines with an increase in nitrogen use at low levels but not at higher levels employing four corn yield experimental plot datasets we investigate the conjecture by introducing a a flexible bayesian extension of the just pope technology to incorporate skewness and b a quantilebased measure of skewness shift bayesian estimation provides strong evidence in favor of negative skewnessatcommercialnitrogenratesandforday sconjecture therewasweakerevidenceinfavorof positively skewed cotton yield and little evidence in favor of the conjecture the results are confirmed by the quantile based measure we also find evidence that skewness becomes more negative upon moving from corn after corn to corn after soybean

a natural resource theory of u s crop insurance contract choice a large variety of subsidized crop insurance products are available to u s crop growers distinct and perhaps puzzling patterns in the choices of insurance products and coverage levels can be discerned where production conditions are better and yields are less risky then a higher insurance coverage levels are chosen and b revenue insurance is preferred over yield insurance also c the extent of preference for revenue insurance is stronger in more productive areas assuming as many do that growers seek to maximize subsidy transfers point a can be explained by the interaction between yield technology and natural resource endowments points b and c can be explained by location in conjunction with the natural hedge and a contract design bias in how revenue insurance guarantees are computed empirical study of risk management agency data on corn soybean and wheat yields and insurance contract choices lend support to our model inferences

extreme dependence in price transmission analysis abstractwe propose a generalized procedure that combines conventional price transmission analysis with copula based dynamic tail dependence to examine price relationships under extreme conditions this approach is used to examine ukrainian wheat markets where export restrictions combined with price surges 2006 2008 and 2010 2012 have contributed to a turbulent market the results indicate that domestic prices were effectively insulated from world price shocks but that a rocket and feathers price relation held between domestic flour and wheat prices these asymmetric price co movements changed with the degree of restrictiveness of the export prohibitions

economic analysis of the introduction of agricultural revenue insurance contracts in spain using statistical copulas this article aims at determining how the introduction of agricultural revenue insurance contracts in spain will affect the cost of purchasing insurance relative to yield insurance schemes we focus our empirical analysis on the apple and orange sectors in spain statistical copulas are used to jointly model price and yield perils premium rates under revenue and yield insurance are simulated through monte carlo methods results indicate that revenue insurance is likely to reduce the price of agricultural insurance in spain which may result in higher acceptance and demand for agricultural insurance programs

adverse selection in crop insurance actuarial and asymmetric information incentives adverse selection is often blamed for crop insurance indemnities exceeding premiums plus subsidies however nationwide empirical evidence has been lacking or based on inadequate county level data this article uses nationwide farm level data on corn and soybeans to decompose incentives for participation in u s multiple peril crop insurance into a risk aversion incentive the conventional justification for insurance an actuarial or subsidy incentive reflecting government subsidization and an asymmetric information incentive which reflects farmers information advantage results show that the risk aversion incentive is small farmers participate in crop insurance primarily to receive the subsidy or because of adverse selection possibilities

self control for the righteous toward a theory of precommitment to indulgence prior research has examined consumers use of self control to avoid hedonic myopic temptations such as overspending and smoking in this research we investigate the opposite form of self control whereby consumers force themselves to indulge and avoid default forms of spending on utilitarian necessities and or savings in particular consumers who have difficulty choosing items that are perceived as indulgences or luxuries e g a cruise over necessities e g saving for college education and cash in everyday decisions may use precommitments to indulgence especially when the psychological cost of such commitments is less concrete these propositions were tested in a series of studies involving real and hypothetical choices as well as process measures the results indicate that a substantial segment of consumers choose hedonic luxury rewards over cash of equal or greater value consumers typically explain such choices based on the need to precommit to indulgence to make sure that the award does no

on backstops and boomerangs environmental r d under technological uncertainty abstract in areas such as climate change the recent economic literature has been emphasizing and addressing the pervasive presence of uncertainty this paper considers a new and salient form of uncertainty namely uncertainty regarding the environmental characteristics of green innovations here rd ii a decreasing probability of finding a backstop leads to the toleration of higher pollution levels slower rd iii learning about the probability of a backstop is driven by failures only and leads to decreasing research incentives and iv small to moderate delays in the resolution of technological uncertainty do not affect the optimal policy

voting for protection an electoral model of tariff policy politicians want to please their constituents and will attempt to manipulate trade policy to further this goal this article elaborates a model of the electoral incidence across congressional districts of the interindustry structure of tariff protection with an application to the mckinley tariff of 1890 it may contribute to a neglected area of research on the domestic politics of tariffs to the history of a period of tariff formation in which there has been little recent work and to the debate over legislative representation of constituency interests models of the domestic political market for trade policy endogenous tariff theory can be divided into four categories with classification based on whether they are formal or empirical and on whether they focus on the demand or the supply side of the political market many of the formal models are too abstract to produce readily testable propositions 1 wolfgang mayer s model for example assumes that tariffs are set by a national popular referendum and deduces tariff structures from median voter results 2 there is no government in this type of model the demanders and suppliers of policy are the same william brock and stephen magee s model assumes a singleissue election in which politicians bid for votes by offering tariff protection up to the point at which marginal gains votes plus campaign contributions equal marginal costs lost votes plus lost contributions 3

quality matters more than quantity asymmetric temperature effects on crop yield and quality grade climate change affects agriculture by altering not only output quantity but also crop quality we quantify the economic impacts of climate change on agriculture through changes in both quantity and quality where quality is measured by crop grades our model controls for methodological issues regarding sample selection aggregation phenology and nonlinearity the empirical application to japanese rice production indicates that temperature effects are asymmetric quantity is especially vulnerable to cold whereas quality is vulnerable to extremely high temperature using these results we simulate the effect of global warming and we find that warming a 3 c increase increases farm revenues by improving yield but decreases revenues as a result of deteriorating quality the net effect is negative suggesting that quality matters more than quantity the negative effect however can be mitigated by shifting cultivation periods and or regions overall our results suggest that the estimated impacts of climate change and adaptation strategies could be severely misleading unless quality is considered

the textile bill of 1985 the determinants of congressional voting patterns the following tables show the results of the probit analysis for the senate and the house a table including results for different combinations of the independent variables is included in an unpublished appendix available from the authors upon request the results of the probit analysis for the senate are shown in table 1 all the variables except exp had the expected signs however the results indicate that the two other employment variables and party affiliation are the only factors which we can say with confidence influenced a senator s decision to vote for or against this bill the coefficients reported and labeled der of prob measure the derivative of the probability of a yes vote evaluated at the means of the independent variables in question thus for example the coefficient for unemp in the top line of table 1 should be interpreted as indicating that a one percentage point increase in a state s unemployment rate will cause a 5 89 increase in the probability that the senator will vote for the bill the result for dr the party of the senator shows that in general democrats are more apt to vote for protectionist policies than are republicans this is consistant with president reagan s negative stand on the bill and his threat to veto it should it pass the amendment in question passed the senate on 24 october 1985 by a vote of 54 for to 42 against but the bill it was attached to has been postponed indefinitely the house bill which was passed on 10 october 1985 by a vote of 262 for to 159 against was vetoed by reagan on 17 december 1985 the results of the probit analysis for the house of representatives are shown in table 2 state employment data was used for the house as opposed to data for each voting district this was done for three reasons first employment data is usually reported by state or by county since counties are often divided by congressional district boundaries much personal judgement would be necessary to assign employment figures second the most recent county industry employment data is from 1981 while the data used in this analysis is from 1984 third we feel that in general logrolling is prevalent among a state s representatives for this bill the representatives from twenty six states voted as a block and in all but six states one third or less of that state s representatives voted contrary to the majority all of the probabilities are significant at the 05 confidence level representative s voting patterns are influenced by all of the included factors when unionization is added to the equation its coefficient is very small and negative although it is significant at the 05 confidence level one would expect more significance here since there are more degrees of freedom for the house analysis than for that of the senate when the data from the house and senate are pooled the results are similar to those of the house alone the null hypothesis that the data cannot be pooled was tested using a statistic with eight degrees of freedom 9 721 meaning that the null hypothesis is rejected as in the senate the state unemployment rate and the percent employed in textiles are important influences on the representative s vote and democrats in the house are more likely to vote for protectionist bills than republicans however unlike the senate the percent of a representative s campaign contributions that are donated by industry special interest groups has a significant effect on voting patterns although the point estimates for the magnitudes of the influence are very similar in both cases seventy four percent of the house received campaign contributions from these special interest groups while only 54 of the senate received contributions from these same sources this is probably because only one third of the senate was up for reelection during the time period considered while the entire house was in the process of campaigning for reelection exports also play a role in influencing the probability of a yes vote reducing this probability as employment in export industries increases but the magnitude of the coefficient is only 11 of that for textile employment the significance of this variable in the house is probably due to fear of retaliation expressed by both democrats and republicans this variable was not significant in the senate model most likely because the senate version excluded from the 1 import quota growth rate many countries who might have retaliated representatives appear to respond to a wider variety of constituent interests than do senators while senators voting patterns are only significantly influenced by their political affiliation their state s unemployment rate and the importance of textiles to their state the voting behavior of representatives is influenced by these factors as well as the importance of exports to their state and campaign contributions by textile special interest groups these results affirm the validity of the approach used by baldwin and coughlin they differ from baldwin who finds exports are not a significant influence on the house and from coughlin who does not include export employment as an explanitory variable or analyze the differences in voting patterns between the house and the senate

domestic content legislation house voting and the economic theory of regulation house voting on domestic content legislation provides a rare opportunity to examine the political economy of protectionism with respect to a particular issue rather than by using the traditional interindustry approach the results indicate that a representative s vote in favor of the content legislation and the intensity of the legislator s preferences are positively related to the importance of the auto and steel industries in the representative s district an increasing unemployment rate campaign contributions from labor groups affiliation with democratic party and a liberal ideology despite ideology s statistical significance the results suggest this variable can be disregarded because neither the predictive accuracy nor the explanatory power of the model is improved by its inclusion the estimates also provide insights concerning the impact of changes in the independent variables upon voting patterns

land resilience and tail dependence among crop yield distributions we propose and empirically test a simple model to shed light on the nature of interactions between weather land quality and yield the conceptual model posits substitution relations between water stress metrics and soil quality as well as a soil conditioned threshold water stress level beyond which soil cannot buffer crop yields the model implies that yield yield dependence should vary as growing conditions vary in comparison with intermediate growing conditions yield yield dependence should strengthen when growing conditions are either very good or very poor county yield data strongly support substitution between soil and benign water availability levels but complementarity between soil and beneficial heat variables our estimated model provides qualified support for the hypothesis that better land is more resilient to water stress we estimate a pseudo copula that nests the gaussian copula finding strong evidence of left tail dependence among yields our formal model and empirical findings corroborate others concerns about the appropriateness of current usda rate setting methodologies which posit constant state conditional rank correlations implicitly assumed by use of the gaussian copula an application to aggregate crop yield rate setting suggests that current methods underprice area yield and whole farm premiums applying our empirical model to medium range weather projections under a climate change scenario for the northern great plains we infer that systemic yield correlations will increase in future years