Aflatoxins are poisons that occur naturally in the environment. They are produced mainly by the Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus fungi, which can affect many of important staple crops: maize, sorghum, millet, rice, oilseeds, spices, groundnuts, tree nuts, and cassava. Hot, humid,...

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....

This is a draft paper, submitted in advance of presentation at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association.

Pro-poor growth has been identified as one of the most promising pathways to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) or any subsequent set of goals aiming to reduce poverty worldwide. Related research has developed a multitude of instruments to measure pro-poor growth using absolute and...

A procedure is developed to examine the ex-post impacts of improved maize varieties on poverty in rural Ethiopia. Yield and cost effects of adoption are estimated econometrically under assumptions of both homogeneous and heterogeneous treatment effects. A backward derivation procedure is...

Off-farm work accounts for a substantial and growing share of household income among smallholder farmers in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, but evidence on the effects of these earnings on farm investments remains sparse. We use panel data from a sample of smallholder farmers in Kenya to estimate...

World grains prices dramatically increased between 2007 and 2008, but rice prices especially surged. Utilizing the much larger spike in rice prices than in wheat, this article compares the response of Indian households consuming rice as the staple grain to households consuming wheat. Households...

Does the provision of livestock insurance raise the unintended consequence of stimulating excessive herd accumulation and less environmentally-sustainable herd movement patterns? The impact of insurance is theoretically ambiguous: if precautionary savings motives for holding livestock assets...

Efficient information exchanges between sellers and buyers are essential if prices are to act as a signal for resource allocation in an economy. In the case of seed and planting materials, information on quality traits are often difficult for consumers (farmers) to obtain prior to purchase,...