Using Degree Days to Value Farmland?
by Emanuele Massetti, Robert Mendelsohn and Shun Chonabayashi
Abstract: Farmland values have traditionally been
valued using seasonal temperature and precipitation. A new strand of the
literature argues that degree days over the growing season provide more
accurate predictions of farmland value than seasonal temperature and that
farmland values fall precipitously at 34⁰C. The paper shows that these
hypotheses of the degree day literature fail when accurate measures of degree
days are used.