Category: Uncategorized

My teaching, service, and editorial responsibilities don’t leave me much time for research, much less for blogging these days, so I thought I would write up a quick observation about econometrics.

An old friend (not an applied econometrician) writes (via Facebook, in case you wonder about the telegraphic style of the query):

Econometrics question – have a M.Sc. student doing a study on conservation agriculture (CA) and is developing instruments for CA component use. Any suggestions on appropriate instruments?

My (less-than-helpful) answer:

I, along with a number of other researchers in the areas of agriculture, climate, and food, am one of the authors of the US Department of Agriculture’s assessment report titled “Climate Change, Global Food Security, and the US Food System.”

In the September 8 issue of the Federal Register, USDA chief economist Rob Johansson requested public comments on the report. If you would like to make public comments, you can find the notice here. Comments have to be submitted before 11:59 pm on October 8, 2015.

I have recently finished working on a new working paper titled “Attitudes to Price Risk and Uncertainty: The Earnest Search for Identification and Policy Relevance,” coauthored with my PhD student Yu Na Lee.*

In that paper, we first review the relatively small literature studying the effects of price risk and uncertainty on consumers, producers, and households. Then, we discuss the potential of experimental economics in identifying price risk preferences and of behavioral economics in developing theoretical models that are closer to how people actually behave. In doing so, we wanted to lay out a future research agenda on price risk.

Here is the abstract: