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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:

I have been pondering a post on heteroskedasticity in this series for a good long while, but I just wasn’t convinced I had much to add. But reading the Wiki entry for heteroskedasticity this past weekend, I realized I might have something to tell those people who have more book knowledge of econometrics than they have practical knowledge of econometrics–a situation which probably describes most graduate students.

First off, what is heteroskedasticity? It is an issue that arises when the variance of the error term e in

Y = a + bX + e

is nonspherical. Seeing as to how this isn’t exactly helpful, a more intuitive explanation is the following: