Reproduction Materials For: On the Timing of Relevant Weather Conditions in Agriculture

<p><strong>PI-Provided Abstract</strong>: A growing literature is analyzing the effects of weather on agricultural outcomes. In these studies, constructing weather variables requires researchers to define a “season”, a period over which weather conditions are considered relevant to the outcome. We explore the consequences of assuming an incorrect season in such analyses. We show in simulations that imposing an incorrect season introduces non-classical measurement error in weather regressors, causing unknown biases. We propose an approach to recover the “true” underlying season and apply it to a US state-level panel of agricultural TotalFactor Productivity. We find that accounting for seasonality can lead to substantially different estimates.Keywords: weather, seasons, climate change, agriculture, non-classical measurement error, grid search approach Note: Links to raw data sources are in the readme file in the zip folder.</p>