Environmental Drivers of Agricultural Productivity Growth: CO₂ Fertilization of US Field Crops / Charles A. Taylor, Wolfram Schlenker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Taylor, Charles A.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Schlenker, Wolfram.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w29320.

NBER working paper series no. w29320

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2021.

Summary:

Post-war growth in agricultural productivity outpaced the US non-farm economy, spurred by steadily increasing crop yields. We argue that rising atmospheric CO₂ is responsible for a significant share of these yield gains. We present a novel methodology to estimate the CO₂ fertilization effect using data from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite. Our study complements the many field experiments by regressing county yields on local CO₂ levels across the majority of US cropland under actual growing conditions. For identification, we utilize year-to-year anomalies from county-specific trends, an instrument for those CO₂ anomalies using wind patterns, and a spatial first-differences approach. We consistently find a large CO₂ fertilization effect: a 1 ppm increase in CO₂ equates to a 0.4%, 0.6%, 1% yield increase for corn, soybeans, and wheat, respectively. In a thought exercise, we apply the CO₂ fertilization effect we estimated in our sample from 2015-2021 backwards to 1940, and, assuming no other limiting factors, find that CO₂ was the dominant driver of yield growth--with implications for estimates of future climate change damages.

Notes:

Print version record

October 2021.