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

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...

Social networks play an important role in generating learning externalities that can drive the diffusion of innovative, and potentially poverty-reducing, technologies. This is particularly the case in developing countries where rural education, extension, and agricultural information services...

We introduce a fast and inexpensive method to rule out potential barriers to adopting a technology. We use this method to asses the role of exogeneous contract enforcement as a barrier to market for Kenya's French Bean export market. We survey 240 farmers in Kirinyaga County, Kenya who were...

Constrained access to land is increasingly recognized as a problem impeding rural household welfare in densely populated areas of Africa. This study utilizes household and plot level data from rural Kenya to explore the linkage between land access and food security. We find that a 10% increase...

Development projects frequently use the strategy of group formation to promote project interventions such as producer groups and savings and lending groups. These groups are formed and encouraged by development projects for two primary reasons: 1) because the success of the intervention in some...