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...

The Global Food Price Crisis of 2007-2011 had mixed effects on the poor in developing nations. By some estimates, the Crisis lifted nearly 24 million poor farmers out of poverty; however, it also cast 68 million net food buyers into poverty. In this paper, we analyze the distributional impacts...

In this paper, we examine how China, the world’s largest rice producer and consumer, would affect the international rice market if it liberalized its trade in rice and became more fully integrated into the global rice market. The impacts of trade liberalization are estimated using a...

The U.S. dairy industry has seen major restructuring in the last few decades. The number of U.S. dairy farms has declined significantly and the decline has been concentrated among smaller farms. In the meantime, average dairy herd size increased from 19 cows in 1970 to 175 in 2010 and milk yield...

Lack of protection from downside risk has been posited as one explanation for sluggish technology uptake among subsistence agricultural households in the developing world. Access to credit and insurance is thought to be a stimulant to technology adoption where new methods are riskier but higher...