Open Access Open Access  Restricted Access Subscription or Fee Access

Statistical Evaluation of the Effect of Ethanol in US Corn Production: A Flexible Test for Independence on a Constrained Sum

Kobi Abayomi, Dexin Luo, Valerie M. Thomas

Abstract


We investigate the effect of ethanol (biofuel) production on competing uses for corn through a case study of U.S. corn production. Currently, agricultural models are used to estimate the effect of biofuel production on crop production and, correspondingly, land use change. These models can potentially be validated with statistical analysis of changes in crop use. Standard statistical methods are inappropriate, however, because the uses of an agricultural crop are constrained: total crop use is always the sum of the constituents. We develop a general method for these compositional distributions, and apply this method to determine competition between ethanol feedstock production and other alternate products of corn. We find evidence of competition among the constituents of corn yield, particularly with respect to ethanol production.

Keywords


Empirical Copula, Multivariate Dependence, Liouville Distribution, Multivariate Kolmogorov Smirnov Distance, Biofuel, Land Use Change, Ethanol

Full Text:

PDF


Disclaimer/Regarding indexing issue:

We have provided the online access of all issues and papers to the indexing agencies (as given on journal web site). It’s depend on indexing agencies when, how and what manner they can index or not. Hence, we like to inform that on the basis of earlier indexing, we can’t predict the today or future indexing policy of third party (i.e. indexing agencies) as they have right to discontinue any journal at any time without prior information to the journal. So, please neither sends any question nor expects any answer from us on the behalf of third party i.e. indexing agencies.Hence, we will not issue any certificate or letter for indexing issue. Our role is just to provide the online access to them. So we do properly this and one can visit indexing agencies website to get the authentic information. Also: DOI is paid service which provided by a third party. We never mentioned that we go for this for our any journal. However, journal have no objection if author go directly for this paid DOI service.