Replication Data and Codes for "Farmers’ Reactions to the US-China Trade War: Perceptions Versus Behaviors"

This data and Stata replication codes is for the article "Farmers’ Reactions to the US-China Trade War: Perceptions Versus Behaviors" forthcoming in the Journal of AAEA.
Following Dillman et al. (2014) Tailored Survey Design method, we sent mixed-mode surveys via mail and online through Qualtrics to 3,000 crop farmers over the age of 18 with at least 250 acres of cropland in Iowa (44%), Illinois (32%), and Minnesota (23%). The survey asked about farmers’ demographic and farm characteristics, most frequently used media sources for trade-war information, perceived farm income loss in 2018 from the trade war before MFP payments, perceived helpfulness of the first round of MFP payments in 2018, and various farming and marketing decisions. We received 722 responses (a 24.1% response rate), and 64% of the responses were via mail. After dropping respondents who did not provide expected income loss from the trade war (a main outcome of interest) and other important farm characteristics, 471 usable observations remained, and constitute the analysis sample in this article.
The key independent variable (Appendix Tables A1 and A2), media bias, comes from the open-ended question, “When seeking information about the trade disruption, what are your three most frequently used media sources?” We classify the reported media outlets into three categories—liberal, neutral, and conservative based on bias scores from Mediabiascheck.com (Appendix Table A2). The raw bias score for individual sources ranges from liberal bias (-6≤bias score<-1) to mostly neutral (-1≤bias score≤1) to right bias (1