It's Loud Up There...

This news is a few weeks old, but I managed to bag another fun  (at least to me)  publication. It started as a footnote in my MS thesis in the Fall 2014 semester at Purdue University, with my eventual PhD advisor, Jim Binkley. Finding this paper a home took us a while, but now it can rest easy. Its title: " The Chow Test with Time Series-Cross Section Data ". It was the first journal article I ever helped write, let alone submit to a journal. While there's hopefully more to come, it's my most recent. If you have a regression model using nested data over groups and subgroups (e.g. industries & firms, counties & states) you may want to test for the presence of group effects. Often this is done with a Chow Test to examine differences in slopes for the groups' regression lines. However, if each datapoint has multiple observations (e.g. each county in the states in your sample has 5 years' worth of data), then this method may inadvertently detect subgroup d...

I recently received some very good news that a journal article my friend and I coauthored and put under review was finally accepted for publication in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics . The article is titled, "Adapting network theory for spatial network externalities in agriculture: A case study on hemp cross-pollination". Rolls right off the tongue, no? The idea came to me one night when a group of Murray State ag faculty, local farmers, and hemp processors met for a dinner with the USDA Office of the General Counsel at the Big Apple Grill & Bar in town (highly recommend, if you're ever in Murray, KY). One farmer during the conversation spoke up and said he grew hemp for CBD production in a specific field that year, but was going to switch to growing hemp for fiber or grain in that field the next year. Turns out, a neighboring field was growing hemp for fiber, it shed its pollen, the pollen landed on the flowers of the first farmer's hemp (detrimen...

For a while now, I've been meaning to begin writing a new blog post, but couldn't seem to find the exactly right starting point (if there is such a thing). Some advice from one of my PhD committee members came to mind, "At this stage, don't think --- write !". So, once again, I find myself putting that wise mentor's advice into action. We just harvested our first pineapple since 2018! Way back then, I was writing my dissertation from our little apartment on the eastern end of Indianapolis while I worked my first big kid job (full time, salary, benefits, meetings where people say stuff like "aligned", the works). Our daughter was just a few months old and learning to crawl around --- faster each day, much to our first-time parental concern. This is, as I recall, a dwarf South African pineapple. As you can see in the picture, it is quite small. But it is absolutely bursting with flavor, which you would expect given that it is stem-ripened rather than p...