We assess the CO₂ fertilization effect on US agriculture using spatially-varying CO₂ data from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite covering the majority of US cropland under actual growing conditions. This study complements the many CO₂ enrichment experiments that have found...

The livelihoods of the majority of the world's poor depend on agriculture. They face substantial risk from fluctuations in weather conditions. Better risk, credit and savings markets can improve productivity and welfare in rural areas but entail high administrative costs. We consider a classic...

Agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) lags far behind all other regions of the world. A long list of policy experiments has yielded more evidence on what fails than on what works. We analyze a randomized control trial of a rare scaled-up success story: One Acre Fund's small...

The boll weevil spread across the Southern United States from 1892 to 1922 having a devastating impact on cotton cultivation. The resulting shift away from this child labor-intensive crop lowered the opportunity cost of attending school, and thus the pest increased school enrollment and...

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...

U.S. agriculture was transformed during the 20th century by waves of innovation with mechanical, biological, chemical, and information technologies. Compared with a few decades ago, today's agriculture is much less labor intensive and farms are much larger and more specialized, supplying a...

Crop production is subject to supply shocks, and both expected and realized outputs as well as output prices are unknown when inputs are chosen. The process by which producers form expectations is difficult to model, especially when working with aggregate data. We present a necessary and...

If the extension of federal crop insurance programs to cover fruit and vegetable production has affected either producer or consumer welfare, then we would expect to see this reflected in output and prices. Exploiting variation in the timing of program introduction in different locations for...

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...

The U.S. has a long history of providing generous support for the agricultural sector. A recent omnibus package of farm legislation, the 2008 Farm Bill (P.L. 110-246) will provide in excess of $284 billion in financial support to U.S. agriculture over the 2008-2012 period. Commodity program...