While cash transfers consistently show large effects on immediate outcomes like consumption, limited access to markets may mute their impact on productive investment. In an experiment in Malawi, we cross-cut cash transfers with an "input fair," designed to reduce transport costs to access...

The expansion in farm size is an important contributor to agricultural productivity in developed countries, but the reallocation process is hindered in less developed economies. How do distortions to factor reallocation affect farm dynamics and agricultural productivity? We develop a model of...

Crop farmers have few short-run options for reducing downside production risk from changes in drought frequency and intensity due to ongoing climate change. However, one recently available option is drought-tolerant (DT) varieties. We determine how recent drought exposure, drought risk, and...

Besides a variety of production and environmental benefits, cover cropping has been advocated as a mean to increase resilience to drought. We explored factors influencing farmer's adoption of cover crops and examined the effects of cover crops on soybean yield and its risk using USDA's 2018 ARMS...

We link census records for millions of farm children to identify owner-operators of the family farm in adulthood, providing the first population-level evidence on intergenerational farm transfers. Using our panel of U.S. census data from 1900 to 1940, our analysis supports the primogeniture...

Climate change increases weather variability, exacerbating agricultural risk in poor countries. Risk-averse farmers are unable to tailor their planting decisions to the coming season, and underinvest in profitable inputs. Accurate, long-range forecasts enable farmers to optimize for the season...

Many countries subsidize agricultural inputs but require farmers to travel to retailers to access inputs, just as for normal purchases. What effect do travel costs have on subsidy take-up and input usage, particularly for remote farmers? We analyze Malawi's Farm Input Subsidy Program (FISP), and...

This paper estimates returns to scale for manufacturing industries around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States by exploiting an industry-city panel data for the years 1880-1930. We estimate decreasing returns to scale on average over the period, contrary to most of the existing...

Entrepôts are hubs that facilitate trade between multiple origins and destinations. We study these entrepôts, the network they form, and their impact on international trade. We document that the trade network is a hub-and-spoke system, where 80% of trade is shipped indirectly--nearly all via...

Might firms' use of data create market power? To explore this hypothesis, we craft a model in which economies of scale in data induce a data-rich firm to invest in producing at a lower marginal cost and larger scale. However, the model uncovers much richer interactions between data, welfare and...