responsiveness of crop yield and acreage to prices and climate we investigate the effect of crop price and climate variables on rainfed corn and soybean yields and acreage in the united states using a large panel dataset for the 1977 2007 period instrumental variables are used to control for endogeneity of prices in yield and acreage regressions while allowing for spatially auto correlated errors we find that an increase in corn price has a statistically significant positive impact on corn yield but the effect of soybean price on soybean yields is not statistically significant the estimated price elasticities of corn yield and acreage are 0 23 and 0 45 respectively of the increase in corn supply caused by an increase in corn price we find that 33 8 is due to price induced yield enhancement and 66 2 is due to price induced acreage expansion we also find that the impact of climate change on corn production ranges from 7 to 41 and on soybean ranges from 8 to 45 depending on the climate change scenarios time horizon and global climate models used to predict climate change we show that the aggregate net impact of omitting price variables is an overestimation of the effect of climate change on corn yield by up to 9 and on soybean yield by up to 15

private transfers borrowing constraints and the timing of homeownership the 1991 italian survey of household income and wealth contains retrospective information on intergenerational transfers this information is used to estimate the impact of transfers on the saving time required to purchase a house it is found that transfers have a small impact on saving time and that after receiving a transfer households purchase considerably larger homes the results have implications for the debate about the source of the relation between aggregate saving and growth

acreage decisions under risk the case of corn and soybeans an acreage supply response model is developed under expected utility maximization the resulting framework is used to specify and estimate a system of risk responsive acreage equations for corn and soybeans in the united states particular attention is given to the truncation effects of government price supports on the distribution of corn and soybean prices also a wealth variable is included in the acreage equations the empirical results indicate that risk and wealth variables play an important role in cornsoybean acreage decisions the analysis also shows that cross commodity risk reduction is important in acreage allocation decisions

generational accounting in the uk this paper presents the first set of generational accounts for the united kingdom we find that under our baseline scenario in which pensions are price indexed and health expenditure grows modestly the imbalance in uk generational policy is small when compared with other leading industrial countries like the united states japan and germany however under an alternative policy scenario where all social benefits are wage indexed and health care spending is increased there is a larger fiscal bill left for future generations to pay in this case achieving generational balance would require much stronger medicine

estimating the environmental impact of land and production decisions with multivariate selection rules and panel data we propose an estimation procedure dealing with multivariate selection and dynamics in land choice and unobserved heterogeneity in structural and crop selection equations the method is applied to a multi output profit function with multiple corner solutions and farm level panel data estimation results reveal that the single selection rule associated with the tobit procedure is rejected in favor of our multivariate selection treatment inconsistent estimates are expected with the tobit procedure or if farmer fixed effects are omitted which can have important consequences for policy recommendations as illustrated in an evaluation of nitrogen runoff elasticities with respect to economic variables copyright 2011 oxford university press

global growing area elasticities of key agricultural crops estimated using dynamic heterogeneous panel methods we estimate the short and long run global response of corn soybeans wheat and rice growing areas to output price changes allowing responses to vary across countries using methods from the panel time series literature our estimates of growing area response are considerably lower than estimates obtained using more traditional models previous findings appear biased due to the assumption of homogeneous response across countries our aggregate estimates of short and long run elasticities of four crop growing areas with respect to average price are 0 024 and 0 143 respectively crop specific results indicate that both corn and soybean growing areas are generally more responsive than wheat and rice for corn and soybeans the long run own price growing area elasticities are 0 274 and 0 793 respectively the long run own price elasticities for wheat and rice are 0 279 and 0 045 respectively the short run own price elasticities for corn and soybeans are 0 133 and 0 199 respectively which are higher than wheat 0 037 and rice 0 00001

intergenerational transfers and capital market imperfections evidence from a cross section of italian households abstract we investigate whether a system of family finance exists and to what extent it is able to offset capital market imperfections a simple model of intergenerational transfers implies that the probability of a liquidity constrained consumer receiving a transfer is negatively correlated with his current endowment and positively correlated with his future resources we test this proposition using a recent survey of italian households in which both transfer recipients and liquidity constrained households are readily observable the results indicate that private transfers help to ease borrowing constraints however a substantial number of liquidity constrained households remain after transfers have been made

multicrop production models with multinomial logit acreage shares the main objective of this paper is to show that the multinomial logit mnl framework can be used for deriving simple acreage share models more specifically we show that mnl acreage choice models can be defined as parts of consistent multicrop models when coupled with suitably designed crop production models e g a specific parameterization of the standard quadratic yield function the parameters of these multicrop models are easily interpreted and estimated although mnl acreage choice models are usually derived by aggregating crop choices defined at the plot level we show that these models can also be derived by considering a profit maximisation problem at the farm level this provides a simple theoretical background for the standard mnl acreage share model as well as for simple extensions of these models the nested mnl acreage share models an empirical application on french farm level data over the period 1996 2007 investigates the empirical performances of the multicrop econometric models based on the proposed mnl framework for modelling acreage choices

a dynamic model of acreage allocation with general and crop specific soil capital we develop an empirically tractable model of acreage allocation decisions in which farmers consider impacts of current crop production 00 future soil productivity because of the soil productivity effects future crop prices are shown to affect current acreage allocations government programs which alter farmers expectations of future crop prices relative to current prices also alter farmers consideration of soil productivity effects of current acreage allocations reduced form and structural versions of our model are shown to yield reasonable parameter estimates

saving and capital market imperfections the italian experience italy s saving rate is high by international standards even when differences in growth are taken into account we argue that credit and insurance market imperfections provide a plausible explanation for the high italian saving rate we also reject the potential roles of the public sector informal financial arrangements bequests and the slope of the earnings profile as alternative explanations of the evidence

estimating the supply response of cotton and cereal crops in smallholder production systems recent evidence from mali cotton is one of the most important crops in west africa and is a major catalyst of economic development in rural areas but the sector has suffered from a decline in the world cotton price after 1999 this article exploits an unusual data set following 82 farmers over 14 years from 1994 through 2007 to estimate a nerlovian supply response model for cotton maize sorghum and millet in long term rotation the resulting system of equations is estimated with two stage least squares 2sls showing that this sample of malian cotton producers have responded to prices in a relatively inelastic manner with supply elasticities only about one half of those estimated for producers in developed countries policy reforms could help producers respond more easily to prices changes as well as to raise average productivity levels

a comparison of national saving rates in the uk us and italy abstract we develop the approach of gokhale kotlikoff and sabelhaus 1996 understanding the postwar decline in us saving a cohort analysis brookings papers on economic activity 0 315 390 based on the life cycle model of savings to decompose the differences in the national saving rates between the uk us and italy our work suggests that the us saving rate is lower principally because americans on average retire later in contrast the italian saving rate is higher predominantly because italians are credit constrained particularly when young we also found that demography and the different tax and benefit systems are able to explain little of the cross sectional differences in saving rates the study accounts for the possible importance of inter generational private transfers in determining saving rates

aggregate consumption and saving in the postwar united states two commonly used sources of aggregate expenditure data are personal consumption expenditures in the national income and product accounts and the consumer expenditure surveys administered by the bureau of labor statistics we adjust both data sources to incorporate the service flows from owner occupied housing and other consumer durables a comparison of the two estimates of aggregate expenditure reveals that the differences between the two data sets have been growing over time by 1989 the level of aggregate expenditure in the national accounts exceeds that reported in the consumer expenditure surveys by 1224 billions less than half of this difference can be attributed to definitional differences in the two data sources

life cycle expenditure allocations and the consumption costs of children abstract in this paper we assess whether it is changing needs or intertemporal substitution that dominate household expenditure responses to the presence of children over the life cycle we construct lifetime expenditure paths for households with different demographic profiles and consider the shape of these paths and some possible implications for welfare measures simulated expenditure paths based on consistent single period and multi period models indicate that it is indeed changing needs that dominate such paths in periods when children are present in the household however allowing for intertemporal substitution is still shown to be important since it can introduce new information relevant to the calculation of household welfare

implicit prices of soil characteristics for farmland in iowa arguments have long persisted that purchasers pay too much for poor land i e less productive more erosive relative to the higher quality counterpart in other words purchasers are either irrational or poorly informed relative to the differences in land productivity between poor and good farmland similar arguments have been advanced concerning the willingness to pay rent on the part of tenant operators little empirical evidence exists to support or reject this hypothesis farmland appraisals are sometimes cited as evidence to support the contention but such empiricism may indicate more about the quality and biases of appraisers than about the behavior or efficient functioning of the farmland market resolution of this issue is extremely important to the formation of soil conservation policy designed to protect soil productivity irrational behavior on the part of land purchasers may lead one to infer that the market system is failing to recognize adequately the soil productivity consequences of soil erosion if this oversight consistently leads to excessive soil erosion from society s perspective then some form of government intervention may be necessary to protect the welfare of society assuming that such intervention is capable of correcting the market failure

harvesting a renewable resource under uncertainty abstract this paper presents a theory of harvesting that allows for partial harvests and accounts for the risk of extinction for biological assets with size dependent stochastic growth the harvesting decision is formulated as a disinvestment problem in continuous time and generalized faustmann formulas are derived the probability of extinction is then analyzed for a wide class of growth functions an illustration based on the logistic brownian motion shows that both optimal biomass at harvest and harvest size do not vary monotonically with uncertainty more generally this paper illustrates the importance of properly accounting for barriers in stochastic investment problems

impacts of ethanol on planted acreage in market equilibrium the magnitude of land conversion caused by biofuels expansion largely determines whether biofuels reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to examine this issue we model how equilibrium changes in input use and land allocation decisions respond to market and policy induced increases in corn ethanol demand we demonstrate why total cropland area unambiguously increases with increased ethanol demand the impact of ethanol price subsidies and consumption mandates are examined in the context of technical change if ethanol demand is elastic enough an exogenous increase in corn yields leads to cropland expansion with price subsidies yield increases under consumption mandates reduce land use copyright 2010 oxford university press

futures prices in supply analysis are instrumental variables necessary citation nathan p hendricks joseph p janzen aaron smith futures prices in supply analysis are instrumental variables necessary american journal of agricultural economics volume 97 issue 1 1 january 2015 pages 22 39 https doi org 10 1093 ajae aau062

kram a sector model of danish agriculture background and framework development this paper outlines a new spatial nonlinear programming model of the agricultural sector in denmark the kram model kvl s rationalized agricultural model optimizes production functions on a very disaggregated level allowing for analysis of changes in physical constraints to production as well as price changes the model is dynamic with a time horizon of 10 years the structural development is determined endogenously using profits and a markov chain model the purpose of this paper is to place kram in a theoretical framework future work will address the programming calibration and application of kram

estimating supply response in the presence of farm programs previous empirical research on crop supply response has given insufficient attention to the fundamentally different nature of supply response under farm programs versus competitive markets a simple theoretical model is presented which highlights the program participation option in the farmer s acreage allocation decision the model also provides the basis for different expected supply elasticities under free market and farm program regimes for corn and soybeans econometric supply estimation for corn belt states for 1948 80 using a temporally disaggregated approach confirms a greater supply elasticity for corn and a lower supply elasticity for soybeans under acreage restricting feed grain programs

modeling agricultural supply response using mathematical programming and crop mixes mathematical programming models are widely used in agricultural sector analysis however the lack of micro level data as well as computational requirements necessitate the aggregation of individual producers into representative units when working at the sectoral level this usually leads to unrealistic extreme specialization in supply responses in 1982 mccarl introduced the historical crop mixes approach to avoid extreme specialization we extend this approach by generating additional synthetic crop mixes using supply response elasticities and systematically varied commodity prices in addition to avoiding extreme specialization this approach provides flexibility when future supply responses can be vastly different from past responses an application to u s biofuel policy analysis is presented