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...

We investigate the link between agricultural productivity and net migration in the United States using a county-level panel for the most recent period of 1970-2009. In rural counties of the Corn Belt, we find a statistically significant relationship between changes in net outmigration and...

Airports are some of the largest sources of air pollution in the United States. We demonstrate that daily airport runway congestion contributes significantly to local pollution levels and contemporaneous health of residents living nearby and downwind from airports. Our research design exploits...

In a letter to the editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Meerburg et al. argue that the predicted yield decreases from climate change in the United States in our earlier study are too pessimistic. They raise two major concerns: First, the authors argue that farmers in...

We provide novel evidence that large-scale irrigation heterogeneously shifts the temperature distribution towards cooler temperatures during the months of the growing season relative to the rest of the year. We employ a triple-difference estimator using a 59-year-long panel of weather records...

There has been an active debate whether global warming will result in a net gain or net loss for United States agriculture. With mounting evidence that climate is warming, we show that such warming will have substantial impacts on agricultural yields by the end of the century: yields of three...

We consider an ecosystem with two distinct equations of motion that are separated by a threshold value of the state variable. We find that increasing uncertainty (both uncertainty embedded in the natural system and uncertainty of the decisionmaker about the location of the threshold) can lead to...

We estimate annual discontinuities in remotely-sensed crop yields at all international land borders and link them to changes in the economic freedom index by the Fraser Institute, a country-level measure of institutional quality. Each point of the ten-point index increases the discontinuity by...