Aggregate Temperature Measures and the Overestimation of the Impact of Global Warming on Crop Yield

Kaixing Huang () and Peng Zhang

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Existing studies generally use ``aggregate'' temperature measures, such as mean temperature, degree-days, temperature bins, and piece-wise linear function within the growing season, to estimate the impact of global warming on crop yield. These temperature measures blend temperatures from different phenological stages of crop growth and thus implicitly assume that temperatures are additively substitutable within the growing season. However, this assumption contrasts with agronomic knowledge that crops are more sensitive to temperatures in certain phenological stages. Utilizing a unique site-level data on the detailed phenological stages of major crops in China, combined with crop production data and daily weather data, we develop an econometric model with stage-specific temperature measures. We then compare our estimates with models using traditional aggregate temperature measures, and find that adopting an aggregate temperature measure could overestimate the damage of global warming on crop yield up to two times that estimated using stage-specific temperature measures.

Keywords: Global warming; crop yield; temperature measure; crop phenological stages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q51 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/122600/1/MPRA_paper_122600.pdf original 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:pra:mprapa:122600

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().