Data Descriptions:
The paper of "Yield Risks in Global Maize Markets: Historical Evidence and Future Projections in Key Regions of the World" by Villoria and Chen (2017) use two datasets that are included in the "vc_researchdata" folder. 

1. The file "0_Data_Climate.csv" contains country-level historic observations of growing season climate (temperature and precipitation) during 1941-2014 and country-level historic and future projections of growing season climate during 1961-2099. The data of historic observations are labelled by "CRU3.23" in the column of "climate_model" in the dataset and are sourced from the Climatic Research Unit monthly time-series, Version 3.23 (Mitchell and Jones, 2005; Harris, 2015). The projected data are outputs of 5 climate models, including GFDL, HadGEM, IPSL, MIROC and NorESM under two RCP scenarios (RCP 2.6 and RCP 8.5). The projected data are sourced from the CMIP5 downloading facility at Geoshare (Villoria et al., 2016b). 

2. The file "0_Data_MaizeYield.csv" contains country-level historic observations of maize yields during 1951-2014 and country-level historic and future projections of maize yields during 1961-2099 modeled by AgMip-GGCMI projects. The data of historic observations are labelled by "fao" in the column of "crop_model" in the dataset and are sourced from the FAOSTAT database (accessed on 05/08/2017). The projected data are outputs of 20 climate-RCP-crop model combinations with and without CO2 fertilization. The climate models are GFDL, HadGEM, IPSL, MIROC and NorESM. The crop models are LPJmL and pDSSAT. The RCPs are RCP 2.5 and RCP 8.5. The projected data are sourced from the AgMIP-GGCMI's downloading facility at Geoshare (Villoria et al., 2016a).