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Crop Rotations, Transition Costs, and the Path Dependence of Farm Delinquency

Operating credit in row-crop agriculture is path-dependent: unpaid loan balances roll forward and compound, so a single bad year can initiate a multi-year delinquency spiral. Yet credit underwriting and crop insurance pricing treat farm revenue as …

Crop Insurance and the Pricing of Risk-Reducing Practices: Evidence from Rotational Complexity

Under the Federal Crop Insurance Program, the Actual Production History (APH)--based Continuous Rating Formula (CRF) adjusts producer premiums mainly to unit-level average yield history, not unit-specific downside tail risk. We study how this …

The Price of Fame: The Effect of Award-Winning Pedigrees on the Price of Livestock Genetics

We estimate the impact of winning an award at a cattle show on the price of cattle genetics and that of their relatives. Dairy farmers choose from various dairy bulls for breeding. These bulls possess genetic traits that reflect their productivity, …

Information provision and network externalities (Job Market Paper)

We use a differences-in-differences with a matched control group method to estimate the long-term impacts of genomic selection in the American market for dairy cattle genetics. Genomic selection is an application of big data that uses the entire …

Measuring Flood Resilience using Remote Sensors

What are the effects of floods on reporting likelihood and observable outcomes? I examine this question in the context of a Randomized Control Trial (Shukla and Baylis, 2019) aimed at adopting a specific new technology for small-scale farmers in …

Assortative Mating and Household Income Inequality in Argentina

This paper uses the decomposition method of (Greenwood et Al, 2014) to assess the contribution of *Assortative Mating* to household income inequality in Argentina. For this purpose, the Gini coefficient and contingency tables for spouses’ educational …