Tropospheric Ozone and Winter Wheat Production in England and Wales: A Note

What is it about?

Tropospheric ozone is an air pollutant thought to reduce crop yields across Europe, as evidenced by experimental scientific work. We seek to directly evaluate whether such effects are observed at the farm level, by intersecting a farm level panel dataset for winter wheat farms in England & Wales with information on ambient ozone, and estimating a production function with ozone as a fixed input. Panel data methods, Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) techniques and nested exogeneity tests are employed in the estimation. The results confirm a small, but nevertheless statistically significant negative effect of ambient ozone levels on wheat yields.

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