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

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)...

This paper analyses the household level drivers of agricultural output in Nyabihu District, a densely populated area of rural Rwanda, over the past 26 years. We use a unique two-wave panel dataset spanning a 26-year period, linking the split-off households in 2012 to the original households in...

The strong link between poverty, natural resources and the environment is apparent in smallholder agriculture: farmers are making repeated land use and management decisions while facing diverse resource endowments and significant environmental constraints on production. To investigate the likely...

With the rapidly changing economic environments and numerous challenges hindering smallholders’ adoption of externally developed technologies, it is often argued that farmers’ innovations may be essential in the livelihoods of rural farm households and need to be promoted. Yet a rigorous...

In the context of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) control in New Zealand cattle, we address the problem of management under uncertain disease prevalence by integrating a model of disease transmission and Bayesian learning from testing. We show the implications of accounting for the full dynamic value...

Poster Presentation for the 2014 AAEA Annual Meetings

Land fragmentation, also known as scattered land holdings, is a common phenomenon in agriculture around the world. In some cases, it has even persisted through government-supported land consolidation programs that aim to improve agricultural productivity. This study evaluates the effect of land...