Rainy-season farming is a major source of income for the rural population in the Guinea Savannah zone of West Africa. Farming systems in the region are dominated by rain-fed production of cereals, but include also leguminous crops and oilseeds. A recent World Bank study has identified high...

Pudrición del Cogollo (PC) is a major threat to the Colombian oil palm industry. This article develops a forestry model to obtain the optimal control strategy and optimal moment of replanting after PC attacks. Three cases are considered: a benchmark consisting of an oil palm field with no PC...

This paper contributes new empirical evidence and nuanced analysis on the gender difference in access to extension services and how this translates to observed differences in technology adoption and agricultural productivity. We employ a cross-sectional instrumental-variable regression method...

Topic Relevance Foliar diseases often reduce grain yields of winter wheat in the southern Great Plains, with some individual year yield losses in excess of 10%. At current prices, the gross value of these losses for the region could exceed a quarter of a billion dollars annually. Historically,...

Satellite-detected luminosity is sometimes used to proxy for economic activity although only recently within the mainstream economics literature (Henderson et al., 2012). If this method works it holds great promise for developing countries with weak statistical systems that face difficulties in...

We exploit variation in the timing of specialty crop insurance supply to different crops and counties in California to assess its effect on output as decomposed into yield and harvested acreage. Four woody-perennial crops and one field-annual crop are used to represent this effect. We find that...

This paper investigates the nonparametric analysis of technology under non-convexity. The analysis extends two approaches now commonly used in efficiency and productivity analysis: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) where convexity is imposed; and Free Disposal Hull (FDH) models. We argue that, while...

Many studies find that areas more dependent on natural resources grow more slowly – a relationship known as the resource curse. For counties in the south-central U.S., I find little evidence of an emerging curse from greater natural gas production during the 2000s. Increases in population...

Texas High Plains (THP) is a major cotton producing region in the US with low rainfall and decreasing irrigation water availability. Hence stochastic rainfall poses considerable production risk in the region and developing strategies to maximize the average profit and minimize the year to year...