No Arabic abstract
This paper quantifies the significance and magnitude of the effect of measurement error in satellite weather data in the analysis of smallholder agricultural productivity. The cross-country analysis leverages multiple rounds of georeferenced, nationally-representative, panel household survey data that have been collected over the last decade. These data are spatially-linked with a range of geospatial weather data sources and related metrics. The goal is to provide systematic evidence on obfuscation methods, satellite data source, and weather metrics in order to determine which of these elements have strong predictive power over a large set of crops and countries and which are only useful in highly specific settings.
Agriculture is arguably the most climate-sensitive sector of the economy. Growing concerns about anthropogenic climate change have increased research interest in assessing its potential impact on the sector and in identifying policies and adaptation strategies to help the sector cope with a changing climate. This chapter provides an overview of recent advancements in the analysis of climate change impacts and adaptation in agriculture with an emphasis on methods. The chapter provides an overview of recent research efforts addressing key conceptual and empirical challenges. The chapter also discusses practical matters about conducting research in this area and provides reproducible R code to perform common tasks of data preparation and model estimation in this literature. The chapter provides a hands-on introduction to new researchers in this area.
Literature about the scholarly impact of scientific research offers very few contributions on private sector research, and the comparison with public sector. In this work, we try to fill this gap examining the citation-based impact of Italian 2010-2017 publications distinguishing authorship by the private sector from the public sector. In particular, we investigate the relation between different forms of collaboration and impact: how intra-sector private publications compare to public, and how private-public joint publications compare to intra-sector extramural collaborations. Finally, we assess the different effect of international collaboration on private and public research impact, and whether there occur differences across research fields.
This paper examines how subsistence farmers respond to extreme heat. Using micro-data from Peruvian households, we find that high temperatures reduce agricultural productivity, increase area planted, and change crop mix. These findings are consistent with farmers using input adjustments as a short-term mechanism to attenuate the effect of extreme heat on output. This response seems to complement other coping strategies, such as selling livestock, but exacerbates the drop in yields, a standard measure of agricultural productivity. Using our estimates, we show that accounting for land adjustments is important to quantify damages associated with climate change.
In this paper we study the impact of errors in wind and solar power forecasts on intraday electricity prices. We develop a novel econometric model which is based on day-ahead wholesale auction curves data and errors in wind and solar power forecasts. The model shifts day-ahead supply curves to calculate intraday prices. We apply our model to the German EPEX SPOT SE data. Our model outperforms both linear and non-linear benchmarks. Our study allows us to conclude that errors in renewable energy forecasts exert a non-linear impact on intraday prices. We demonstrate that additional wind and solar power capacities induce non-linear changes in the intraday price volatility. Finally, we comment on economical and policy implications of our findings.
Agricultural research has fostered productivity growth, but the historical influence of anthropogenic climate change on that growth has not been quantified. We develop a robust econometric model of weather effects on global agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) and combine this model with counterfactual climate scenarios to evaluate impacts of past climate trends on TFP. Our baseline model indicates that anthropogenic climate change has reduced global agricultural TFP by about 21% since 1961, a slowdown that is equivalent to losing the last 9 years of productivity growth. The effect is substantially more severe (a reduction of ~30-33%) in warmer regions such as Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean. We also find that global agriculture has grown more vulnerable to ongoing climate change.