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Crop Yield Skewness Under Law of the Minimum Technology
Author(s) -
Hennessy David A.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
american journal of agricultural economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.949
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1467-8276
pISSN - 0002-9092
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8276.2008.01181.x
Subject(s) - skewness , yield (engineering) , skew , plot (graphics) , constraint (computer aided design) , distribution (mathematics) , resource (disambiguation) , mathematics , economics , econometrics , agricultural engineering , statistics , physics , computer science , mathematical analysis , geometry , computer network , engineering , thermodynamics , astronomy
No satisfactory motivation has been forwarded in favor of any crop yield distribution, including the normal. This article explores the foundations of yield distributions for the Law of the Minimum resource constraint technology at the plot level of analysis. With independent, identical, uniform resource availability distributions the yield skew is positive, whereas it is negative whenever the distributions are normal. Simulations show how asymmetries in resource availabilities determine skewness. It is suggested that a negative yield skew occurs whenever production is tightly controlled so that the left tails of some resources availabilities distributions are thin. Irrigation may increase yield skewness.