We study the impact of plausibly exogenous global food price shocks on local violence across the African continent. In food-producing areas, higher food prices reduce conflict over the control of territory (what we call "factor conflict") and increase conflict over the appropriation of surplus...

Increased global demand for biofuels is placing increased pressure on agricultural systems at a time when traditional sources of yield improvements have been mostly exhausted, generating concerns about the future of food prices. This paper estimates the impact of global adoption of genetically...

We study the effects of globalization on agricultural productivity across countries. We develop a multi-country general equilibrium model that incorporates choices of crops and technologies in agricultural production at the micro-level of fields covering the surface of the earth. We estimate our...

Extreme heat is the single best predictor of corn and soybean yields in the United States. While average yields have risen continuously since World War II, we find no evidence that relative tolerance to extreme heat has improved between 1950 and 2005. Climate change forecasts project a sharp...

Although auction prices are based on actual transactions, they provide a thick market only for high quality, expensive wines and may overestimate climate's effect on farmer revenues. Wholesale prices, on the other hand, do provide broad coverage of all wines sold and probably come closest to...

This paper employs a stochastic frontier approach to examine how climate change and extreme weather affect U.S. agricultural productivity using 1940-1970 historical weather data (mean and variation) as the norm. We have four major findings. First, using temperature humidity index (THI) load and...

A large agronomic literature models the implications of climate change for a variety of crops and locations around the world. The goal of the present paper is to quantify the macro-level consequences of these micro-level shocks. Using an extremely rich micro-level dataset that contains...

A growing body of economics research projects the effects of global climate change on economic outcomes. Climate scientists often criticize these articles because nearly all ignore the well-established uncertainty in future temperature and rainfall changes, and therefore appear likely to have...

Nitrogen (N) fertilizer use in agricultural production is a significant determinant of surface water quality. As climate changes, agricultural producers are likely to adapt at extensive and intensive margins in terms of land and per acre input use, including fertilizers. These changes can affect...

The United States produces 41% of the world's corn and 38% of the world's soybeans, so any impact on US crop yields will have implications for world food supply. We pair a panel of county-level crop yields in the US with a fine-scale weather data set that incorporates the whole distribution of...