Replication Data and Codes for "Farmers’ Reactions to the US-China Trade War: Perceptions Versus Behaviors"
Description
This data and Stata replication codes is for the article "Farmers’ Reactions to the US-China Trade War: Perceptions Versus Behaviors" forthcoming in the Journal of AAEA. Following Dillman et al. (2014) Tailored Survey Design method, we sent mixed-mode surveys via mail and online through Qualtrics to 3,000 crop farmers over the age of 18 with at least 250 acres of cropland in Iowa (44%), Illinois (32%), and Minnesota (23%). The survey asked about farmers’ demographic and farm characteristics, most frequently used media sources for trade-war information, perceived farm income loss in 2018 from the trade war before MFP payments, perceived helpfulness of the first round of MFP payments in 2018, and various farming and marketing decisions. We received 722 responses (a 24.1% response rate), and 64% of the responses were via mail. After dropping respondents who did not provide expected income loss from the trade war (a main outcome of interest) and other important farm characteristics, 471 usable observations remained, and constitute the analysis sample in this article. The key independent variable (Appendix Tables A1 and A2), media bias, comes from the open-ended question, “When seeking information about the trade disruption, what are your three most frequently used media sources?” We classify the reported media outlets into three categories—liberal, neutral, and conservative based on bias scores from Mediabiascheck.com (Appendix Table A2). The raw bias score for individual sources ranges from liberal bias (-6≤bias score<-1) to mostly neutral (-1≤bias score≤1) to right bias (1<bias score≤6). For example, CNN is classified as a liberal media based on a bias score of -2, while Fox News is classified as a conservative media based on a bias score of five. Three farmer associations without available scores (Farm Bureau, Soybean Producers’ Association, and Corn Producers’ Association) have center-right bias, according to the expert opinions of farm management specialists from Iowa State University Extension. Puglisi and Snyder (2015) corroborate these expert opinions. We assign bias scores of two to the three farmer associations and conduct robustness checks by classifying them as neutral. All other farm-related sources are classified as neutral. The main conservative and liberal bias measures are continuous bias scores calculated by summing bias scores of conservative and liberal media sources separately. If an individual does not list any conservative or liberal media, the corresponding score is zero. For example, if a farmer watches FOX News (bias score = 5) and PBS (bias score = -1), and reads Wall Street Journal (bias score = 3), her cumulative bias score for conservative and liberal media would be 8 and -1, respectively. The cumulative score for liberal media is converted to be positive in regressions so that its magnitude increases with the degree of bias. Whether the respondent consumes neutral media is included as a binary control variable.
Files
Steps to reproduce
The Stata codes are included in the replication package, change the path in the second line of analysis.do and the run it to generate all results. The results will be saved to the Results folder
Institutions
Categories
Funding
National Institute of Food and Agriculture
IOW05511, IOW04099, 2019-67023-29414
Iowa State University