We utilize an agricultural model that uses crop/weather relationships at the county resolution and fits robust distributions that take into account the impact that weather has on crop production. Once the crop insurance policy conditions and prices are applied to the modeled county yield...

Exogenous, unobserved factors often confound the effects of alliance networks. More capable farmers might be less likely to exit and more likely to have a large number of alliances. In this case the negative correlation between alliance network size and exit likelihood is due to the unobserved...

Households in developing countries take various actions to smooth income or consumption as a means of managing or responding to risk. One of the principal means of smoothing income is through the diversification of income sources, including non-farm employment and rural-urban migration. An...

This paper is based on an ongoing joint work with David Sahn and Xiaobo Zhang.

Agricultural technology adoption is often a sequential process. Farmers may adopt a new technology in part of their land first and then adjust in later years based on what they learn from the earlier partial adoption. This paper presents a dynamic adoption model with Bayesian learning, in which...

NAREA Outstanding Master's Thesis Award, NAREA Master's Thesis Award of Merit, NAREA Distinguished Member Awards, NAREA Award for Outstanding Public Service Through Economics, and NAREA's Journal Article of the Year for 2008