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...

Food systems in developing countries are transforming, involving a rapid expansion of supermarkets. This supermarket revolution may affect dietary patterns and nutrition, but empirical evidence is scarce. The few existing studies have analyzed implications for food consumers and producers...

Many of the ‘new’ agricultural input subsidy programs (ISPs) in sub-Saharan Africa list raising farm incomes and reducing rural poverty among their objectives, but are ISPs achieving these objectives? We use data from two nationally-representative surveys of smallholder farm households in...

This paper uses year-to-year variation in temperature to estimate the long-term effects of climate change on health outcomes in Mexico. Combining temperature data at the district level and three rounds of nationally representative household surveys,an individual’s health as an adult is matched...

High poverty rate persists in rural Kenya, where farming households continue to depend on agriculture for food and income, despite economic growth. Maize is the most widely grown crop, with the maize-growing smallholder population quite heterogeneous and diversified.However, less than half the...

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...

Effective food security work in developing countries, such as Mali, relies on a thorough understanding of the rural farming system. A common approach is to study land allocation decisions to specific crops. In accomplishing this, one challenge is to model all production outcomes in a multi-crop...

Contract farming has frequently been shown to increase the income of participating households. Whether contract farming increases other aspects of household welfare, however, remains unclear. Using a 1,200-household data set from Madagascar and the results of a contingent valuation experiment...