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.

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...

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,...

This paper quantifies the economic impacts of flooding in the Ba River and Penang River catchments in Viti Levu, Fiji. We conducted a detailed assessment of flood damage stemming from two major flooding events in 2012 that severely affected the two important catchments, primarily by using...

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...

While climate change is widely regarded as a threat to food security in southern Africa, few studies attempt to link the science of climate change impacts on agriculture with the specificities of smallholder livelihoods. In this paper, we build a series of linear programming (LP) farm-household...