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Quantifying Structural Change in U.S. Agriculture: The Case of Research and Productivity

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Abstract

Previous work on structural change in agriculture has failed to distinguish long-run trends from structural breaks leading to new trends. We measure structural changes as statistically significant breaks in either stochastic or deterministic time trends, and apply these measures to agricultural productivity and research. Productivity has a break in 1925 accompanying agriculture's early experience with the Great Depression. Research trends shifted in 1930 as the Depression and new technology began to strongly influence efficient farm size and capitalization. After modeling lags between research and productivity impacts in a vector autoregression (VAR), we compare our results to earlier work by developing a procedure to estimate the rate of return to research from the impulse response function of the VAR.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Agricultural Economics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 48824

    James F. Oehmke

  2. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 1800 M Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20036

    David E. Schimmelpfennig

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  1. James F. Oehmke
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  2. David E. Schimmelpfennig
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Oehmke, J.F., Schimmelpfennig, D.E. Quantifying Structural Change in U.S. Agriculture: The Case of Research and Productivity. Journal of Productivity Analysis 21, 297–315 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:PROD.0000022095.97676.42

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:PROD.0000022095.97676.42

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