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...

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...

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...

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries are rich in natural resources and in most of them their extractive industries extract and export natural resources with little industrial processing. This study analyzes the direct and indirect impacts that the extractive industries in...

Information and communication technology plays an important role in achieving a higher level of energy efficiency. In particular, energy efficiency can be achieved by integrating information technology into electricity networks to enable the interaction between suppliers and customers (smart...

Agricultural credit is one of the most crucial inputs in all agricultural development programmes. Access of rural credit has still remained scarce in India. Primary Agriculture Credit Societies (PACS) working at grass-root level, having direct contact with the rural people and meet their...

This paper studies the effect of competition on ethnic discrimination by carrying out a field experiment in the context of the rice market in Bangladesh. We recruit professional rice buyers (middlemen) to act as judges in a rice competition by providing a quality rating and a price quote for...

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...

We present cross-country evidence suggesting that agricultural credits have a positive impact on agricultural productivity. In particular, we find that doubling agricultural credits generates around 4-5 percent increase in agricultural productivity. We use two different agricultural production...

In this study, we document the effect of Food Stamp access on adult health care utilization. While Food Stamps is one of the largest safety net programs in the U.S. today, the universal nature of the program across geographic areas and over time limits the potential for quasi-experimental...