Potato Potahto in the FAO-GAEZ Productivity Measures? Nonclassical Measurement Error with Multiple Proxies

Rafael Araujo and Vitor Possebom

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: The FAO-GAEZ crop productivity data are widely used in Economics. However, the existence of measurement error is rarely recognized in the empirical literature. We propose a novel method to partially identify the effect of agricultural productivity, deriving bounds that allow for nonclassical measurement error by leveraging two proxies. These bounds exhaust all the information contained in the first two moments of the data. We reevaluate three influential studies, documenting that measurement error matters and that the impact of agricultural productivity on economic outcomes may be smaller than previously reported. Our methodology has broad applications in empirical research involving mismeasured variables.

Date: 2025-02, Revised 2025-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-eff
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12141 Latest version (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:arx:papers:2502.12141

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().