Xi Chen acknowledges generous Doctoral Research Grant from the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University and precious data set provided by the Development Strategy and Governance Division at IFPRI. Conference Travel Grant provided by the Department of Applied Economics and...

This paper is based on our ongoing joint work with Ravi Kanbur. Xi Chen is grateful to Ravi Kanbur for invaluable comments, guidance and encouragement. For comments and suggestions, please direct correspondence to Xi Chen at xc49@cornell.edu.

Numerous national transfer programs around the world are designed with uniform benefit schedules imposed by central governments, but implemented by local governments. The Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) in Ethiopia, the second largest safety net in Sub Saharan Africa, is one such program....

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/28/11. Former title: Indirect Effects of Microfinance: A Field Experiment on Formal Savings Expansion and Informal Safety Nets of the Ultra-Poor

This paper investigate the effect of credit constraints on children’s academic performances in Vietnam. To estimate precise effect, this paper measures the credit constraints directly and address endogeneity of credit constraints. The results tell us that credit constraints have more effect on...

We examine how the system of “federalism, Chinese style” functions in the context of land allocation. China’s land laws give provision of land a central role in local officials’ growth promotion strategies. Requisitions of farmland by local authorities have engendered significant rural...

This paper investigates the farm-household decisions of adopting and abandoning higher-productivity technologies, under different scenarios of inclusion into the credit and deposit markets. The financial environment is further characterized by shallow financial markets, represented by a...

In less-developed economies such as Bangladesh where the farm sector is the major source of employment and income, the rural nonfarm sector (RNF) often as an additional source of income increasingly plays an important role in fostering the development of the rural economy, and microenterprise...

The United States dairy industry is heavily dependent on foreign labor. Current and newly proposed U.S. immigration policies have been appointed to disrupt the agricultural labor availability, especially that of hired foreign labor. A national survey of dairy farmers across herd sizes and...