We examine the impact of a six-fold increase in the global vanilla price on smallholder vanilla-farming households in Madagascar. The price increase leads to sizable gains in household assets and significant improvements in adult psychological well-being, cognitive performance, and optimism...

The last decade has seen a resurgence of parastatal crop marketing institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, many of which cite improving food security and incomes as key goals. However, there is limited empirical evidence on the welfare effects of these programs. This article considers one such...

Market completeness has important implications for household behavior. I firmly reject complete markets for smallholders but am unable to do so for non-smallholders. This leads to important differences in production behavior: smallholders reallocate labor across activities less in response to...

I investigate the intra-household labor and resource allocation consequences of an employment guarantee targeting rural households in India. The guarantee insures household earnings, replacing women as added workers and shutting down a motive for saving. Despite sizable program-job take-up, the...

Trust is crucial for successful collective action. A prime example is collective commercialization of agricultural produce through producer organizations. We conduct a cluster-randomized controlled trial in rural Senegal in which we vary the number and the type of smallholder farmers - members...

Most support programs targeted at small firms in low- and middle-income countries fail to generate transformative effects at a large scale due to bad targeting, too little flexibility, and the limited size of the support, among others. This paper assesses the short-term effects of a randomized...

Smallholder agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa is largely exposed to pervasive market failures, translating into missed opportunities and sub-optimal economic behavior. These failures can partly be traced to the importance of economies of scale in procuring inputs and marketing produce, where...

We study a parent's demand for gratitude from his child. We view this demand as an intervening variable between the parent's earnings and the incidence of child labor. The demand for gratitude arises from the desire of a parent to receive care and support from his child late in life, while the...

This paper addresses the apparent paradox between widespread support of cattle farming by agricultural policy interventions and negative returns to cattle as stressed in recent works. Using a representative panel dataset for Andhra Pradesh, a state in the south of India, we examine average and...

Fertility is a main driver and outcome of long-term growth. Yet, fertility may not only interact with the level of income but also with its volatility. In pre-modern economies where formal social security was largely absent, fertility decisions may also have been made in view of insuring income...