More than 40% of US grain is used for energy due to the Renewable Fuels Mandate (RFS). There are no studies of the global distributional consequences of this purely domestic policy. Using micro-level survey data, we trace the effect of the RFS on world food prices and their impact on household...

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,...

Do constraints to technology adoption vary by behavioral traits? We randomize 150 villages in Bangladesh into being offered standard microcredit, loans with a grace period, the choice between those two contracts, and control. No discernible average effects are detected on the adoption of...

The study investigates the effect of the spouse's access to financial services (credit or savings) through membership in a self-help group on adopting technology, technical efficiency, and managerial gaps. To estimate the empirical model, we use farm-level data from rice farming households in...

This paper shows how the hedonic approach to vineyard site selection can be used in the adaptation of vineyard land to climate change, natural disasters or other exogenous events. The basic idea is that, if the relation between weather and grape quality is known for each grape type in existing...

This paper presents an econometric mediation analysis. It considers identification of production functions and the sources of output effects (treatment effects) from experimental interventions when some inputs are mismeasured and others are entirely omitted.

Reliable measures of body composition are essential in order to develop effective policies to tackle the costs of obesity. To date the lack of an acceptable gold-standard for measuring fatness has made it difficult to evaluate alternative measures of obesity. In this paper we draw on work in...

This paper develops and estimates a model with multiple schooling choices that identifies the causal effect of different levels of schooling on health, health-related behaviors, and labor market outcomes. We develop an approach that is a halfway house between a reduced form treatment effect...

The debate over whether contingent (and typically more precarious) employment acts as a bridge to permanent employment, or as a trap, has tended to focus on transitions rather than longer-run pathways. This approach cannot accurately identify indirect pathways from contingent to permanent...

Individuals' level of engagement on the labor market is hypothesized to be of critical importance for labor market outcomes. Based on a recent labor market survey in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), this paper develops an innovative index to measure individuals' labor market engagement across...