Bowen Chen

Bowen Chen

Ag/Applied Economist

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A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there is an XML version available for digesting as well.

Pages

About me

Agriculture, Economics, Data Science

Posts

The Balance-Sample Size Frontier in Matching

less than 1 minute read

Published:

In this short article, I explore the concept of matching frontier proposed by Professor Gary King and his colleagues at Harvard. The article is published at Towards Data Science.

Looking Inside Mahalanobis Metric Matching

less than 1 minute read

Published:

In this short article, I explain the Mahalanobis metric matching method and how it can be easily implemented in R. The article is published at Towards Data Science.

Matching estimator is powerful, and simple

less than 1 minute read

Published:

In this short article, I explain how propensity score matching works in practice using 13 lines of R codes. The article is published at Towards Data Science.

publications

Yield risks in global maize markets: Historical evidence and projections in key regions of the world

Published in Weather and Climate Extremes, 2018

In this study, we assess the magnitude of correlated yield risks across key maize producing countries in the historical times and in the future. We find on evidence of high dependency of maize yields across countries, yet an possibility of higher incidence of yield extremes toward mid-century.

Recommended citation: Chen, B, Villoria, NB. "Yield risks in global maize markets: Historical evidence and projections in key regions of the world." Weather and Climate Extremes. 2018. 19: 42– 48

Climate shocks, food price stability and international trade: evidence from 76 maize markets in 27 net-importing countries

Published in Environmental Research Letters, 2019

In this article, we address the question that if food imports increase the variability of domestic food prices. We approach this question by conducting an empirical research that uses maize price data observed in 76 maize markets of 27 maize net importers across Africa, Asia and Latin America during 2000–2015. We find that, on average, a 1% increase in the ratio of imports to total consumption is correlated with a 0.29% reduction of the intra-annual coefficient of variation of maize prices.

Recommended citation: Bowen Chen and Nelson B Villoria. (2019). "Climate shocks, food price stability and international trade: evidence from 76 maize markets in 27 net-importing countries." Environmental Research Letters. 14 014007.

WTO Dispute Panel Report on China’s Administration of Tariff Rate Quotas (TRQs) for Certain Agricultural Products

Published in farmdoc daily, 2020

In this article, we investigated on the impacts of China’s tariff rate quota policy on its imports of wheat, corn and rice using a partial equilibrium trade model. Our key findings are that the tariff quota administration might have reduced China’s quota fill rates for the grain commodities by 10–35% during 2013–2017.

Recommended citation: Orden, D., C. Xie, B. Chen, L. Brink and C. Zulauf. "WTO Dispute Panel Report on China’s Administration of Tariff Rate Quotas (TRQs) for Certain Agricultural Products." farmdoc daily. (9):84, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May 8, 2019.

Tariff quota administration in China’s grain markets: An empirical assessment

Published in Agricultural Economics, 2020

In this article, we investigated on the impacts of China’s tariff rate quota policy on its imports of wheat, corn and rice using a partial equilibrium trade model. Our key findings are that the tariff quota administration might have reduced China’s quota fill rates for the grain commodities by 10–35% during 2013–2017.

Recommended citation: Chen, B, Villoria, NB, Xia, T. "Tariff quota administration in Chinas grain markets: An empirical assessment." Agricultural Economics. 2020. 51: 191– 206

Lapham’s Quarterly: Trade (Book Review)

Published in American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2020

Lapham ‘s Quarterly is a quarterly publication about history and literature, and it was founded and edited by Lewis H. Lapham, a famous American author and editor. Each quarterly presents a host of excerpts from historical writings (e.g., books, essays and letters) on a particular topic by ancient, medieval, modern, and post‐modern writers. The publication also includes a lot of figures and art. The spring issue of 2019, an issue to be reviewed here, focuses on one of the most hotly debated topics: trade.

Recommended citation: Chen, B. (2020) "Lapham's Quarterly: Trade, Lewis H. Lapham, 2019, Lapham's Quarterly." American Journal of Agricultural Economics. doi:10.1002/ajae.12069

Predicting the rental value of houses in household surveys in Tanzania, Uganda and Malawi: Evaluations of hedonic pricing and machine learning approaches

Published in Plos One, 2021

We examined whether or not a class of machine learning methods provided superior prediction of rental value of housing over OLS methods accounting for spatial autocorrelations using household level survey data from Uganda, Tanzania, and Malawi, across multiple years. Our results showed that the machine learning methods are the best models in predicting house values using out-of-sample data set for all the countries and all the years.

Recommended citation: Embaye, Weldensie T., Zereyesus, Yacob Abrehe, Chen, Bowen. "Predicting the rental value of houses in household surveys in Tanzania, Uganda and Malawi: Evaluations of hedonic pricing and machine learning approaches." PLOS ONE. 2021. 16(2).

Conservation tillage mitigates drought induced soybean yield losses in the us corn belt

Published in Q Open, 2021

This article estimates the effects of conservation tillage on county average corn and soybean yields using remotely-sensed tillage practice adoption data in 646 counties across 12 Corn Belt states from 2005 to 2018.

Recommended citation: Chen, Bowen, Gramig, Ben M., Yun, Seong D. "Conservation tillage mitigates drought induced soybean yield losses in the us corn belt." Q Open. 2021.

talks

teaching