Heterogeneous Yield Impacts from Adoption of Genetically Engineered Corn and the Importance of Controlling for Weather
Jayson Lusk,
Jesse Tack () and
Nathan Hendricks
No 23519, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Abstract:
Concern about declining growth in crop yields has renewed debates about the ability of biotechnology to promote food security. While numerous experimental and farm-level studies have found that adoption of genetically engineered crops has been associated with yield gains, aggregate and cross-country comparisons often seem to show little effect, raising questions about the size and generalizability of the effect. This paper attempts to resolve this conundrum using a panel of United States county-level corn yields from 1980 to 2015 in conjunction with data on adoption of genetically engineered crops, weather, and soil characteristics. Our panel data contain just over 28,000 observations spanning roughly 800 counties. We show that changing weather patterns confound simple analyses of trend yield, and only after controlling for weather do we find that genetically engineered crops have increased yields above trend. There is marked heterogeneity in the effect of adoption of genetically engineered crops across location partially explained by differential soil characteristics which may be related to insect pressure. While adoption of genetically engineered crops has the potential to mitigate downside risks from weeds and insects, we find no effects of adoption on yield variability nor do we find that adoption of presently available genetically engineered crops has led to increased resilience to heat or water stress. On average, across all counties, we find adoption of GE corn was associated with a 17 percent increase in corn yield.
JEL-codes: C23 O47 Q16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
Note: PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)
Published as Heterogeneous Yield Impacts from Adoption of Genetically Engineered Corn and the Importance of Controlling for Weather , Jayson L. Lusk, Jesse Tack, Nathan P. Hendricks. in Agricultural Productivity and Producer Behavior , Schlenker. 2019
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23519.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Chapter: Heterogeneous Yield Impacts from Adoption of Genetically Engineered Corn and the Importance of Controlling for Weather (2018) 
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:nbr:nberwo:23519
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23519
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().