Project by Chandra Kiran:
Using a 25-year panel on more than 300 districts, and newly available gridded climate datasets, we estimate the impact of climate change on Indian agriculture. The effects of random year-to-year variations in weather are used to estimate the relationship between weather and agricultural yield, separately for the major food crops, for each season. This approach permits delineation of impacts by crop and by growing season, unlike previous work for India. In addition, we use a newly developed quantile regression framework for fixed effects panel data, which allows for differential impacts of weather and climate at different quantiles of yield. We find robust, negative impacts of climate change on wheat yields while impacts on Rice yields are positive at the lowest quantiles and are relatively unchanged at the higher quantiles.