Hennessy, David A.

American Journal of Agricultural Economics Vol. 91 no. 1 (February 2009): 197-208.

No satisfactory motivation has been forwarded in favor of any crop yield distribution, including thenormal. This article explores the foundations of yield distributions for the Law of the Minimum resourceconstraint technology at the plot level of analysis.With independent, identical, uniform resourceavailability distributions the yield skew is positive, whereas it is negative whenever the distributionsare normal. Simulations show how asymmetries in resource availabilities determine skewness. It issuggested that a negative yield skew occurs whenever production is tightly controlled so that the lefttails of some resources availabilities distributions are thin. Irrigation may increase yield skewness.

JEL Classification: O32, Q12, Q15, Q16

Keywords: beta-normal distribution; crop insurance, Liebig technology, limiting factors, order statistics, reliability, weakest-link

Full Text