Investment in improved agricultural inputs is infrequent for smallholder farmers in Africa. One barrier may be limited access to formal savings. This is the first study to use a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of using mobile money as a tool to promote agricultural investment....

Improving productivity among microenterprises is important, especially in low-income countries where market imperfections are pervasive, and resources are scarce. Relaxing credit constraints can increase the productivity of microenterprises. Using a field experiment involving agricultural...

Why do farm households inefficiently allocate resources across the plots they cultivate? We explore how these production inefficiencies relate to consumption decisions and information sharing within the household. In a lab-in-the-field experiment, male producers allocate too few inputs to their...

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...

In many parts of the world, several decades of intensively applying Green Revolution technologies came at environmental costs, i.e. degraded water and soil quality as well as a loss of biodiversity. This has led to an increased interest in alternative farming systems such as organic farming,...

Cash transfers successfully alleviate poverty in many developing countries. South Africa is a case in point, implementing one of the largest unconditional cash transfer programmes internationally, and with substantial benefits to household well-being along multiple dimensions. Yet, grants...

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...

African agriculture's importance for sustainable development is well appreciated. Indeed, recent years have seen a thorough reappraisal of the sector. What are less well understood, however, are the drivers that reallocate scarce human and physical resources across occupations and space, and...

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...

This paper investigates the effects of an income guarantee on borrowing to smooth consumption and finance cultivation in a risky setting with marked seasonality. A three-season, infinite-horizon theoretical model is developed and analyzed. The insights yielded by the model are then used to...