Climate Stress and U.S. Dairy Production
Published:
The decision
Heat stress lowers milk yield, but the size of the effect drives real decisions: how much cooling infrastructure is worth installing, how insurers should price weather exposure, and where adaptation support does the most good. Point estimates that ignore confounding or impose the wrong functional form give misleading guidance on all three.
Approach
Double/debiased machine learning lets flexible learners absorb high-dimensional controls while preserving valid inference on the treatment effect. The panel structure supports temporal validation, and the specification is compared against a transparent baseline so the gain from the more complex method is visible rather than assumed.
Status
Analysis in progress, as the working paper Estimating impacts of climate stress on US milk production: a panel data with debiased machine learning approach. This page will carry the reproducible code repository, a data dictionary, validation results, and stated limitations once the work is complete.