Reverse tenancy, wherein poorer landlords rent out land to richer tenants on shares, is a common phenomenon. Yet, it does not fit existing theoretical models of sharecropping and has never before been modeled in the development microeconomics literature. We explain reverse tenancy contracts...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/20/10.

Does the provision of livestock insurance raise the unintended consequence of stimulating excessive herd accumulation and less environmentally-sustainable herd movement patterns? The impact of insurance is theoretically ambiguous: if precautionary savings motives for holding livestock assets...

In this paper we estimate the effects of an imperfect insurance coverage on subjective well-being of a poor, rural population, by exploring whether insurance in force improves subjective well-being and whether insurance that lapsed but did not pay out leads to ex post buyer’s remorse....

This paper uses detailed, transactions-level data and a structural-heteroskedasticity-in-mean model to identify the determinants of livestock producer prices for pastoralists in the drylands of northern Kenya. The empirical results confirm the importance of animal characteristics, periodic...

In assessing the productivity gains of a new technology, it is often difficult to determine the extent to which observed output gains are due to the technology itself, rather than to the skill of the farmer or the quality of the plot on which the new technology is tried. This problem of...

Although rice accounts for approximately forty-four percent of land under cultivation and forty-six percent of caloric intake in Madagascar, most farmers cannot produce enough rice to feed their families. Total rice production increased little in the country during the 1990s, and yields were...