Adaptation to Climate Change through Crop Choice: A High Resolution Analysis

Haoying Wang, Ariel Ortiz-Bobea and Shun Chonabayashi

No 205840, 2015 AAEA & WAEA Joint Annual Meeting, July 26-28, San Francisco, California from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: Recent statistical studies suggest yields for major U.S. food crops will dramatically decrease under climate change due to the rise of extreme temperatures over the growing season. However, these results do not account for changes in the crop mix, therefore overestimating potential damages to the sector. In this study we seek to determine how the crop mix and growing regions would shift in response to climate change. The paper develops a dynamic multinomial discrete choice framework to model adaptation to climate change through crop choice. A major innovation of this study is the construction of a very large high-resolution data set for the econometric analysis and the computational procedure developed to obtain estimates. We combine data on crop cover (USDA Cropland Data Layer (CDL), 30*30 meter resolution) and climate variables (PRISM, 4*4 km resolution) for the study region, matched with crop prices and production costs at regional level. The data set provides billions of spatial units from which we sample for the spatial analysis. The main advantage of such an extensive and detailed data set is the careful consideration of the spatial heterogeneity within counties. The generality of our empirical framework allows prediction of crop choices at field level under various climate change scenarios. The preliminary empirical results show that both market state variables (yields, prices, and costs) and crop state variables (related to crop rotations) are important predictors of farmers' crop choice at field level.

Keywords: Agricultural and Food Policy; Crop Production/Industries; Environmental Economics and Policy; Farm Management; Land Economics/Use; Production Economics; Research Methods/ Statistical Methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18
Date: 2015-05-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dcm and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/205840/files/D ... EA2015_submitted.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea15:205840

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.205840

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2015 AAEA & WAEA Joint Annual Meeting, July 26-28, San Francisco, California from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().