The Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture in the Southwestern United States: The Ricardian Approach Revisited

This paper estimates a Ricardian model of farmland value across the counties of the semiarid Southwestern United States. Compared to previous contributions, we focus on one climate zone and include the presence of extreme weather events and of farm subsidies in our analysis. We also control for heterogeneity and for various types of spillover effects. Once calibrated, the model is used to project changes due to future climate conditions. We find that the probability of a decrease is great in highland counties while an increase or decrease is equally probable in lowland counties where climate impacts farmland value less.