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...

Unlike in the United States where fertility is found to be negatively correlated with female labor force participation, China has witnessed a decrease in both fertility and female labor force participation since the 1980s. Does fertility play a different role in female labor force participation...

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...

Rapid economic growth in China’s booming regions has left other areas of the country lagging behind. We shed light on the poverty dynamics of one such region by analyzing a census-like survey of three administrative villages of Guizhou province in 2004, 2006, 2009, and 2011. While the absolute...

This paper studies the effect of local off-farm employment and migration on rural households’ technical efficiency of crop production using a five-year panel dataset from more than 2,000 households in five Chinese provinces. While there is not much debate about the positive contribution of...