It seems paradoxical that developed countries continue subsidizing agriculture even though their agricultural sectors have been declining in relative importance since the middle of the 20th century. What drives support for agricultural protection in developed countries? We answer this question...

Many governments try to stabilize commodity prices based on the widespread belief that households value price stability and that the poor especially benefit from food price stabilization. We derive an exact measure of multivariate price risk aversion and of associated household willingness to...

This article tests whether agricultural extension and imperfect supervision -- conflated here into the number of visits by a technical assistant -- increase productivity in a sample of contract farming arrangements between a processing �rm and small agricultural producers in Madagascar....

Under the assumption that the landlord is risk-neutral and the tenant is risk-averse, sharecropping is second-best in that it trades off risk sharing and incentives. Many, however, have reported instances of reverse share tenancy, or sharecropping in which the landlord is considerably poorer...

Do food prices cause political unrest? Throughout history, riots appear to have frequently broken out as a consequence of high food prices. This paper studies the impact of food prices on political unrest using monthly data on food prices at the international level. Because food prices and...

Supermarkets, specialized wholesalers, and processors and agro-exporters’ agricultural value chains have begun to transform the marketing channels into which smallholder farmers sell produce in low-income economies. We develop a conceptual framework through which to study contracting between...

Across the social sciences, lagged explanatory variables are a common strategy to confront challenges to causal identification using observational data. We show that "lag identification"--the use of lagged explanatory variables to solve endogeneity problems--is an illusion: lagging independent...

Why does female genital cutting (FGC) persist in certain places while has declined elsewhere? Using survey data from the Gambia, we study an important aspect of the persistence of FGC, namely the relationship between (i) whether a woman has undergone FGC and (ii) her support for the practice....

Using data from the Philippines, we study the impact of mobile phones on the prices agricultural producers receive for their cash crop. We first look at the impact on price of mobile phone ownership at the household level. Because this masks a considerable amount of heterogeneity, we then look...

What is the impact of participation in agricultural value chains on the welfare of smallholders? Contract farming, wherein a processing firm delegates its production of agricultural commodities to growers, is often viewed as a means of increasing smallholder welfare in developing countries....