Crop Yield Skewness Under Law of Minimum Technology

David Hennessy

Staff General Research Papers Archive from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: No satisfactory motivation has been forwarded in favor of any crop yield distribution, including thenormal. This article explores the foundations of yield distributions for the Law of the Minimum resourceconstraint technology at the plot level of analysis.With independent, identical, uniform resourceavailability distributions the yield skew is positive, whereas it is negative whenever the distributionsare normal. Simulations show how asymmetries in resource availabilities determine skewness. It issuggested that a negative yield skew occurs whenever production is tightly controlled so that the lefttails of some resources availabilities distributions are thin. Irrigation may increase yield skewness.

Keywords: beta-normal distribution; crop insurance; Liebig technology; limiting factors; order statistics; reliability; weakest-link (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O32 Q12 Q15 Q16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-03-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
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Published in American Journal of Agricultural Economics, February 2009, vol. 91 no. 1, pp. 197-208

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Related works:
Journal Article: Crop Yield Skewness Under Law of the Minimum Technology (2009)
Working Paper: Crop Yield Skewness under the Law of Minimum Technology (2007)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:isu:genres:35018

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