It's Loud Up There...

Once again, I'm going to discuss a recent publication of mine (potentially the last one for a while). This time is different. Rather than try to give a high-level overview that abstracts away from all the math and statistics and coding - though some would argue that is the interesting part - I'm going to put the research almost into story form. It all started with  my paper with Tanner McCarty about hemp pollen  drifting from one farm to another and messing things up. We had no data but had to act quickly, so I took part in a paper that was precisely what I thought I swore off of: economic theory. After the KY Department of Agriculture provided us with some key farm-level data on hemp production, we wrote and published  another paper in the AJAE . In the midst of that publishing process, it was brought to our attention by a fellow ag economist that this sort of problem was going on in the soybean sector. Needless to say, Tanner and I were eager to branch out of an area as...

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...