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...

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...

Corn prices increased sharply in the summer of 2012 due to expected production shortfalls in the United States, which produces roughly 40% of the world's corn. A heat wave in July adversely affected corn production. We extend earlier statistical models of county-level corn yields in the Eastern...

Starting in the 1930s, commercial hybrid corn seeds rapidly replaced the once predominant open-pollinated varieties planted by farmers. By the mid-1950s almost all corn grown in the United States was of hybrid varieties. Observers have argued that the drought tolerant qualities of these hybrids...

This paper measures changes in electricity generation costs caused by the introduction of market mechanisms to determine output decisions in service areas that were previously using command-and-control-type operations. I use the staggered transition to markets from 1999- 2012 to evaluate the...

This paper shows that there is a presumption that Pareto efficient taxation entails a positive tax on capital. When tax and expenditure policies can affect the market distribution of income in ways that cannot be directly offset, those effects need to be taken into account, reducing the burden...