This paper is based on an ongoing joint work with David Sahn and Xiaobo Zhang.

Faster agricultural development requires understanding whether the inverse land size-yield relationship exists or not. To verify the presence of this relationship, this study decomposes a yield index into separate components attributable to (1) efficiency, (2) soil quality, (3) land size, (4)...

High poverty rate persists in rural Kenya, where farming households continue to depend on agriculture for food and income, despite economic growth. Maize is the most widely grown crop, with the maize-growing smallholder population quite heterogeneous and diversified.However, less than half the...

China underwent tremendous agricultural market reforms in the 1990s prior to its accession to the WTO, drastically decreasing domestic market distortions. We ask whether these reforms have led to agricultural commercialization and have improved the welfare of rural Chinese households measured by...

This research examines the effect of risk and time preferences on forest management responses to forest tenure land reforms in Fujian, China that began in 2002. The different extent of the reform and its different timing across regions provide a natural experiment to test how time and risk...

The objective of this paper is to examine whether noncognitive skills explain differences in employment status and hourly wages even after controlling for age, experience, schooling and cognitive skills. Of particular interest is to examine the relative magnitudes of the impacts of the cognitive...

Households in developing countries take various actions to smooth income or consumption as a means of managing or responding to risk. One of the principal means of smoothing income is through the diversification of income sources, including non-farm employment and rural-urban migration. An...

Unlike in the United States where fertility is found to be negatively correlated with female labor force participation, China has witnessed a decrease in both fertility and female labor force participation since the 1980s. Does fertility play a different role in female labor force participation...

Food processing has been widely recognized as a traditional, unskilled-labor intensive production. Yet rapid development in technology drives food processing into more sophisticated and technology-oriented industry. This paper utilizes a fixed effects model to test the hypothesis that the food...

The need to provide agricultural information to farmers has led to emergence of numerous ICT-based MIS projects in developing country. These projects aim at promoting commercialization of smallholder agriculture and subsequently their welfare. This study examines the welfare effects of one such...