This paper identifies the factors that affect farmers’ decisions to adopt soil and water conservation technology in Africa and how this technology impacts farm yields and net returns. This technology is important because it improves efficiency of water use from rainfall—a critical issue in...

In China, land is reallocated on either a full-scale or a partial basis. By employing a unique farm survey that deliberately draws a distinction between full-scale and partial land reallocations, and by decomposing their respective expropriation risk effects, we find that the significantly...

Whether the negative relationship between farm size and crop productivity that is confirmed in a large global literature holds in Africa is of considerable policy relevance. Plot-level data from Rwanda point toward constant returns to scale and a strong negative relationship between farm size...

We study how increases in wealth from rapid appreciation of farmland influenced farmer decisions to borrow, buy land, and expand. Exploiting periods of high and low appreciation and a panel data model that allows for correlation between prior growth trends and the share of land owned, we find...

By distinguishing between the decision to participate in the conservation reserve program (CRP) and the decision for whole-farm vs. part-farm participation, we model participation as separate binary decisions. Our results suggest the farm characteristics and other factors affect the decision to...

Previous research on incentive responsivness in voluntary land retirement programs has utilized either hypothetical contingent response methods or actual aggregate enrollment data, both of which suffer from potential biases. In this paper, we analyze program participation in the binary-choice...

We analyze roles of tenure insecurity and household endowments in explaining tree growing in Ethiopia, where farmers cannot sell or mortgage land and factor markets are imperfect. Unlike most other studies, we use panel data and examine determinants of the decision and intensity of tree growing....

This paper contributes to the debate on rural land sales in Africa. First, it shows that the emergence of sales in the forested area of Côte d’Ivoire corresponds to an "imperfect" land commoditization, due to the social embedding of land transfers in the autochthon-migrant relationship. Then,...

Land-use changes involve important economic and environmental effects with implications for international trade, global climate change, wildlife, and other policy issues. We use an econometric model to identify factors driving land-use change in the United States between 1982 and 1997. We...

A conceptual framework distinguishes farmland retention institutions and with a survey of various literatures, interviews, and original policy design, classifies 28 techniques in four types: regulatory, incentive-based, governmental-participatory, and hybrid. The analysis reveals that techniques...