Showing 1 - 10 of 217
Many rural households in low and middle income countries continue to rely on small-scale agriculture as their primary source of income. In the absence of irrigation, income arrives only once or twice per year, and has to cover consumption and input needs until the subsequent harvest. We develop...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012920359
Why is agricultural productivity so low in poor countries relative to the rest of the world? Is it due to geography or constrained economic choices? We assess the quantitative role of geography and land quality for agricultural productivity differences across countries using high-resolution...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012920893
Crop biodiversity has the potential to enhance resistance to strains due to biotic and abiotic factors and to improve crop production and farm revenues. To investigate the effect of crop biodiversity on crop productivity, we build a probabilistic model based on ecological mechanisms to describe...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012954450
A large agronomic literature models the implications of climate change for a variety of crops and locations around the world. The goal of the present paper is to quantify the macro-level consequences of these micro-level shocks. Using an extremely rich micro-level dataset that contains...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013033731
This research explores the origins of the distribution of time preference across regions. It advances the hypothesis, and establishes empirically, that geographical variations in natural land productivity and their impact on the return to agricultural investment have had a persistent effect on...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013048044
What is the effect of cash injections during financial crises? Exploiting county-level variation arising from random weather shocks during the 1980s Farm Debt Crisis, we analyze and measure the effect of local cash flow shocks on the real and financial sector. We show that such cash flow shocks...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012953501
In the U.S., the average 40 year old plant employs almost eight times as many workers as the typical plant five years or younger. In contrast, surviving Indian plants exhibit little growth in terms of either employment or output. Mexico is intermediate to India and the U.S. in these respects:...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013066002
We use individual-level data on all security trades, holdings, spending, and income from an online retail bank. We study the effects of an exogenous change in the displayed purchase prices of the mutual funds in individuals’ portfolios. We find that individuals are more likely to sell what we...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013321646
Common resources may be managed with inefficient policies for the sake of equity. We study how rationing the commons shapes the efficiency and equity of resource use, in the context of agricultural groundwater use in Rajasthan, India. We find that rationing binds on input use, such that farmers,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013308483
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the North American agricultural frontier moved for the first time into semi-arid regions where farming was vulnerable to drought. Farmers who migrated to the region had to adapt their crops, techniques, and farm sizes to better fit the environment. But...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013229090