Climate Change Effects on US Agriculture: Distributional Heterogeneity, Technological Adaptability and Spatial Spillovers

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-18-2019

Publication Title

Journal of Environmental Economics and Managements

Volume

98

First page number:

1

Last page number:

64

Abstract

The existing studies on climate change effects on crop yields focus on the average climate – yield relationship that is typically assumed to be time-invariant. We apply a semiparametric quantile regression with time-varying functional coefficients to examine distributional heterogeneity and temporal variation in this relationship. We find that U.S. corn and soybean yields have gradually become less sensitive to temperature and precipitation over 1948–2010, which is especially the case for upper yield quantiles. Further, the negative impacts of future climate change on yields are of larger magnitudes at lower yield quantiles. Failure to accommodate temporal changes in the climate–yield relationship produces significantly larger negative effects of the overheat temperature (34◦C+) on corn yields in 1990–2010, with the overestimation being particularly large (more than twice the effect size) at lower yield quantiles. Yield declines attributed to future climate change may also be overestimated by as much as six times.

Keywords

Adaptation; Agriculture; Climate Change; Crop Yields; Heterogeneity; Quantile Regression

Disciplines

Agricultural Economics | Agriculture | Life Sciences

Language

English


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