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Geography of crop yield skewness
Author(s) -
Du Xiaodong,
Yu Cindy L.,
Hennessy David A.,
Miao Ruiqing
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
agricultural economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.29
H-Index - 82
eISSN - 1574-0862
pISSN - 0169-5150
DOI - 10.1111/agec.12174
Subject(s) - skewness , econometrics , yield (engineering) , moment (physics) , crop yield , productivity , crop , agriculture , crop insurance , agricultural productivity , agricultural engineering , economics , mathematics , statistics , agricultural economics , geography , agronomy , forestry , materials science , physics , macroeconomics , archaeology , engineering , classical mechanics , biology , metallurgy
Analysis of crop yield distributions provides insights into better understanding how natural resources shape agricultural productivity. This study seeks to provide a rigorous theoretical and empirical understanding of the effects of exogenous geographic and climatic factors on the first three moments of crop yields with focus on the third moment. We hypothesize that exogenous factors having beneficial effects on crop production should make crop yield distributions less positively or more negatively skewed. We employ a large crop insurance data set for corn, soybean, and wheat to find general support for our natural‐resources‐determines‐skewness hypothesis. The proposed statistical method optimally uses correlations between the first three moments. It significantly improves estimation performance over existing methods, including the linear moment model which has been commonly applied in the literature.