What's New in Agricultural Economics?
In early March, I will find out when I participate in this agricultural economics conference . While biofuels appears to be far from "Green Cities", I actually started reading up on biofuels last year when I almost entered the "corn based" ethanol wars. Is it a low carbon fuel? Does its production cause deforestation around the world? Does scaling up its production raise food prices around the world? I had a few subtle points to make about the implicit assumptions built into the Computable General Equilibrium Models that are used for answering these questions.
In the case of California's AB32 and the low carbon fuel standard, I see an interesting case in which the environmental policy has ran ahead of the basic research. Its not clear to what is the "true" carbon emissions factor for different biofuels.
When there is fundamental modeling uncertainty, how do we provide the policy maker with a single number that represents our best guess? If we know that we do not know, should the policy maker be taking a portfolio of actions that we believe feature a negative correlation so that we are protected against the unintended consequences of the policy?
For the nerds, here is one side of the debate.
Returning to what this blog post was supposed to discuss, I think that farmer heterogeneity in adapting to climate change should be one of the major research topics for modern agricultural economics. How important is physical capital and human capital for coping with climate change? What discrete set of choices over location of where they farm, crop type, irrigation, quitting farming and moving to the cities do farmers face?
If you want to see some good work on this topic based on a sample of China's farmers, take a look at this paper by Rob Mendelsohn.
In the case of California's AB32 and the low carbon fuel standard, I see an interesting case in which the environmental policy has ran ahead of the basic research. Its not clear to what is the "true" carbon emissions factor for different biofuels.
When there is fundamental modeling uncertainty, how do we provide the policy maker with a single number that represents our best guess? If we know that we do not know, should the policy maker be taking a portfolio of actions that we believe feature a negative correlation so that we are protected against the unintended consequences of the policy?
For the nerds, here is one side of the debate.
Returning to what this blog post was supposed to discuss, I think that farmer heterogeneity in adapting to climate change should be one of the major research topics for modern agricultural economics. How important is physical capital and human capital for coping with climate change? What discrete set of choices over location of where they farm, crop type, irrigation, quitting farming and moving to the cities do farmers face?
If you want to see some good work on this topic based on a sample of China's farmers, take a look at this paper by Rob Mendelsohn.
posted by Matthew Kahn at 12:35 PM
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