This paper investigates the economic fortunes of coerced vs. free workers in a global supply chain. To identify the differential treatment of otherwise similar workers we resort to a unique exogenous labor demand shock that affects wages in voluntary and involuntary labor relations differently....

Farmland values have traditionally been valued using seasonal temperature and precipitation. A new strand of the literature uses degree days over the growing season to predict farmland value. We find that degree days and daily temperature are interchangeable over the growing season. However, the...

Productivity varies greatly among farmers and the source of that variation is not fully understood. Using a unique Indian household survey, we estimate peer effects on agricultural revenue. Results show that 60% of farmers' revenue is explained by peers. Input expenditures and land allocation to...

People’s value for their own time is a key input in evaluating public policies: evaluations should account for time taken away from work or leisure as a result of policy. Using rich choice data collected from farming households in western Kenya, we show that households exhibit non-transitive...

We quantify the impacts of droughts in New Zealand on the profitability of dairy, and sheep and beef farms. Using a comprehensive administrative database of all businesses in New Zealand, we investigate the impact of droughts on farm revenue, profits, return on capital, business equity, debt to...

We estimate a Ricardian model of Western European agricultural land values using farm-level data. We model the effect of temperature on land values using a flexible specification of daily mean temperature to test if there are temperature threshold effects. Results indicate that there are no...

While much research on China has focused on rural to urban migration and transitions of rural households away from agriculture, little is known about the changes within the rural agricultural sector. Yet, the agricultural sector continues to account for a large share of employment. We study the...

This paper investigates the consequences of a locust plague that occurred in Mali in 2004. We argue that in agricultural economies with a single harvest per year, this type of shock can affect households through two channels: first, a speculative/anticipatory effect that kicks in during the...

This paper provides a new data set of regional income inequalities within countries based on satellite nighttime light data. We first empirically study the relationship between luminosity data and regional incomes for those countries where regional income data are available. We subsequently use...

This paper introduces dynamics in the R&D to innovation and innovation to productivity relationships, which have mostly been estimated on cross-sectional data. It considers four nonlinear dynamic simultaneous equations models that include individual effects and idiosyncratic errors correlated...