Economic Measurement in the Agricultural Economy
The farm sector of the US economy contributes about 0.8 percent of GDP, and the broader agricultural sector, which includes farming, food production, and related industries, accounts for more than 5 percent. Given the highly inelastic demand for food, this sector is likely to generate substantial consumer surplus. Measuring the size of this sector, the value of its output, and the productivity of its inputs are challenging tasks. There are many producers, products are heterogeneous with regard to quality and many other characteristics, and there are spatial disparities in the price of otherwise identical products. Differences in growing practices can furthermore create disparities in otherwise homogenous products, with consumers willing to pay a premium for products grown in particular ways. While many of these challenges are long-standing, new technologies, such as satellite imaging and other forms of remote sensing, digital tools for product tracking, and real-time data generation by farm machinery, are opening new frontiers with regard to measurement.
To promote research on the measurement of the agricultural economy, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with the support of the Economic Research Service at the US Department of Agriculture, will convene a research conference in Washington, DC on Friday, November 6, 2026. The conference will be organized by Tim Beatty (University of California, Davis) and Wolfram Schlenker (Harvard Kennedy School).
Potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Hedonic adjustment of the nominal prices of farm goods to control for quality and attribute variation over time.
- Productivity measurement using field-level disaggregate data along with input measures collected by sensing and other technologies.
- Measurement of labor inputs in agriculture, including seasonal, immigrant, and temporary workers, the implicit labor of family farms, and the productivity effects of substitution toward automation.
- Measurement of farm income, farm profitability, and other measures of farm family well-being.
- Valuation of land and water rights as capital inputs, including the role of expectations about zoning, and energy/development pressure on land prices.
- Estimation of the extent to which rising farmland values reflect the capitalized value of productivity rents, policy rents, amenity/development option values, and the financialization of farmland as an asset class.
- Measurement of innovation, R&D, and technology diffusion in agriculture, including public-versus-private contributions and the lag structure of returns.
- Quality-adjusted measurement of intermediate inputs (ex. seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, and animal genetics) where biological improvements are bundled with the physical input.
- Measurement of vertical integration, contract production, and the boundary of the farm in modern agriculture.
- Measurement of spatial price dispersion and regional basis for otherwise identical commodities, and what it implies about market integration and transport costs.
- Estimation of consumer willingness to pay for credence attributes, such as organic, regenerative, animal welfare, country-of-origin, and locally grown, and the resulting price premia at farm gate and retail.
The organizers will consider submissions of complete, or nearly complete, papers that will be ready to present by November 2026. They welcome empirical and theoretical research, as well as papers by scholars who are early in their careers and who are not NBER affiliates. If any members of the research team have ties to the agricultural industry or other potential conflicts of interest, those ties should be disclosed on the first page of the submission. The program will prioritize research on measuring the US food and farm economy.
To be considered for inclusion on the program, papers must be uploaded by 11:59pm EDT on Tuesday, August 18, 2026 via the following link:
Please feel free to share this call for papers widely with any researchers who might be working on projects that are suitable for presentation.
Please do not submit papers that have been accepted for publication and will be published by November 2026, and be aware that NBER papers may not make policy recommendations or offer normative judgements on policy. Authors chosen to present papers will be notified in early September. The NBER will cover hotel and economy-class conference travel for up to two authors per paper. Questions about this conference may be addressed to confer@nber.org.