Quantifying Structural Change in U.S. Agriculture: The Case of Research and Productivity
Authors: Oehmke J.F.1; Schimmelpfennig D.E.2
Source: Journal of Productivity Analysis, Volume 21, Number 3, May 2004 , pp. 297-315(19)
Publisher: Springer
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Abstract:
Previous work on structural change in agriculture has failed to distinguish long-run trends from structural breaks leading to new trends. We measure structural changes as statistically significant breaks in either stochastic or deterministic time trends, and apply these measures to agricultural productivity and research. Productivity has a break in 1925 accompanying agriculture’s early experience with the Great Depression. Research trends shifted in 1930 as the Depression and new technology began to strongly influence efficient farm size and capitalization. After modeling lags between research and productivity impacts in a vector autoregression (VAR), we compare our results to earlier work by developing a procedure to estimate the rate of return to research from the impulse response function of the VAR.Keywords: agricultural research; multi-factor productivity; stationarity; structural breaks
Document Type: Research article
DOI: 10.1023/B:PROD.0000022095.97676.42
Affiliations: 1: Department of Agricultural Economics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824 2: Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1800 M Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036 des@ers.usda.gov, Email: des@ers.usda.gov
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