How weather affects the decomposition of total factor productivity in U.S. agriculture

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2021-03
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Ortiz-Bobea, Ariel
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Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Association of Agricultural Economists
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This study illustrates and quantifies how overlooking the impact of weather shocks can affect the measurement and decomposition of agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) change. The underlying technology is represented by a flexible input distance function with quasi-fixed inputs estimated with Bayesian methods. Using agricultural production and weather data for 16 states in the Pacific Region, Central Region, and Southern Plains of the United States, we estimate TFP change as the direct sum of multiple components, including a net weather effect. To assess the role of weather, we conduct a comparative analysis based on two distinct sets of input and output variables. A traditional set of variables that ignore weather variations, and a new set of “weather-filtered” variables that represent input and output levels that would have been chosen under average weather conditions. From this comparative analysis, we derive biases in the decomposition of TFP growth from the omission of weather shocks. We find that weather shocks accelerated productivity growth in 12 out of 16 states by the equivalent of 11.4% of their group-average TFP growth, but slowed down productivity by the equivalent of 6.5% of the group-average TFP growth in the other four states (located in the Northern-most part of the country). We also find substantial biases in the estimated contribution of technical change, scale effects, technical efficiency change, and output allocation effects to TFP growth (varying in magnitude and direction across regions) when weather effects are excluded from the model. This is the first study to present estimates of those biases based on a counterfactual analysis. One major implication from our study is that the official USDA's measures of TFP change would appear to overestimate the rate of productivity growth in U.S. agriculture stemming from technical change, market forces, agricultural policies, and other nonweather drivers.
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How Weather Affects the Decomposition of Total Factor Productivity in U.S. Agriculture
( 2019-11-12) Plastina, Alejandro ; Lence, Sergio ; Ortiz-Bobea, Ariel ; Department of Economics (LAS)

Despite the major role of climate in agricultural production, few studies have analyzed how weather fluctuations affect the measurement and decomposition of Total Factor Productivity (TFP). This article proposes a novel framework to decompose TFP change accounting for the influence of weather. Specifically, we estimate the contribution of weather variations, technical change, technical and allocative efficiency, as well as markup, scale and price effects to TFP change. The underlying technology is represented by a multi-input, multi-output flexible input distance function with quasi-fixed inputs of production, and is estimated for major U.S. producing regions using Bayesian methods. To assess the role of weather in the decomposition of TFP growth, we contrast findings from our proposed method with those of a baseline model that ignores weather effects. Overall, our TFP growth estimates are highly similar to those obtained from official USDA indices. However, we find that the contribution of non-weather components to TFP is 14% lower when we account for weather variations. This weatherrelated bias is particularly strong in the Central region of the country. This overestimation of TFP growth that is attributable to non-weather components in previous research thus implies that estimated rates of return to public R&D are also overestimated, which has profound policy implications. This is the first study to document how ignoring weather can bias the decomposition of TFP change estimates.

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JEL Classification: C11, D24, O47, Q18

This article is published as Plastina, Alejandro, Sergio H. Lence, and Ariel Ortiz‐Bobea. "How weather affects the decomposition of total factor productivity in US agriculture." Agricultural Economics 52, no. 2 (2021): 215-234. https://doi.org/10.1111/agec.12615
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© 2021 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
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