This study seeks to provide a rigorous theoretical and empirical understanding of the effects of exogenous geographic and climate-related factors on the first three moments of crop yields. We hypothesize that exogenous geographic and climate factors that have beneficial effects on crop production, such as better soils, less overheating damage, more growing season precipitation and irrigation should make crop yield distributions less positively or more negatively skewed. We employ a large crop insurance dataset for corn, soybean, and wheat to find general support for the hypothesis. The novel empirical method optimally uses correlations between the first three moments and thus significantly improves estimation performance over existing methods.

本研究旨在为外源性地理和气候相关因素对作物产量前三个时刻的影响提供严格的理论和经验理解。我们假设，对作物生产有有利影响的外源地理和气候因素，比如更好的土壤、更少的过热损害、更多的生长季节降水和灌溉，应该会使作物产量分布不那么积极或更消极地倾斜。我们为玉米、大豆和小麦使用了一个大型的作物保险数据集来为假设找到一般的支持。新的经验方法最优地使用了前三个矩之间的相关性，因此大大提高了估计性能比现有的方法。