It's Loud Up There...

I'm generally not a fan of the Fall season. Everything that was once green is now turning brown; what was once blooming and full of life now looks...well, not that. Also, it's getting colder, but at least the bugs are on a shortened timer --- especially mosquitos. Make no mistake: I love that apples are in season, and it's pretty hard to beat a drink of in-season cider. Not to mention, we typically associate Fall with crop harvest, which means (hopefully lots of) grain being stored ready to market (hopefully profitably). But there's one thing that is unique not just to North America, but this part of the US for many thousands of years, and that is the largest tree-borne fruit native to the continent. I'm talking about the pawpaw. Other names include "The Poor Man's Banana", "The Indiana/Hoosier Banana", and "The Mississippi Banana". Quite the pattern in the alternative names, no? Anywhere from mid-September to early-October, the paw...

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...