Climate change and fractional outcomes: A long-run panel study of U.S. crop failure rates and pasture rates

Abstract

This paper adopts the Fractional Response Model (Papke et al., 1996) to the Mérel et al. (2021) panel model to study warming effects on county crop failure and pasture rates across the United States. Warming is predicted to increase national crop failure rates by 0.5 percentage points per $°C$ but not change national pasture rates. Counties with high average failure rates in the southern Great Plains-Rocky Mountain regions are especially vulnerable to warming. Counties in the north will pasture less and counties in the south will pasture more cropland with warming. In contrast, covariates that increase crop productivity, such as groundwater irrigation availability, reduce pasture rate and failure rate. These crop failure and pasture effects must be added to the yield effects reported in the literature to get a complete picture of the effects of climate change on agriculture.