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...

According to USDA Economic Research Service 11.1 percent of all US households were food insecure during some period during 2006. That percentage of food insecure households increased to 14.5 in 2010. In the interim, the country experienced a severe economic recession likely contributing to the...

Groundnuts are an important crop for Ugandan smallholders since they are high in protein, resupply nutrients to the soil, and are a storable source of wealth once dried. Adoption of improved, virus-resistant seed should have a positive impact on household food security, as yields are expected to...

The risk balancing literature suggests that business risk management (BRM) programs may, through risk balancing (offsetting adjustments between business risk and financial risk), lead farmers to take on more financial risk than they would take otherwise, which, in turn, increases the risk of...

Satellite-detected luminosity is sometimes used to proxy for economic activity although only recently within the mainstream economics literature (Henderson et al., 2012). If this method works it holds great promise for developing countries with weak statistical systems that face difficulties in...