We examine whether returns to capital are higher for farmers who borrow than for those who do not, a direct implication of many credit market models. We measure the difference in returns through a two-stage loan and grant experiment. We find large positive investment responses and returns to...

While it is by now well known that the privatization of township- and village-run enterprises (TVREs) has been rapidly and widely taking place in China, it is much less known whether and to what extent privatization has improved resource allocation and productivity. As a first step toward the...

The sharing economy for a wide range of goods and services is expanding across the world. To direct the benefits from sharing capital services towards small-scale producers, governments in the developing world are increasingly intervening in fast-growing mechanization rental markets. However,...

Agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) lags far behind all other regions of the world. A long list of policy experiments has yielded more evidence on what fails than on what works. We analyze a randomized control trial of a rare scaled-up success story: One Acre Fund's small...

We revisit the long-standing empirical evidence of an inverse relationship between farm size and productivity using rich microdata from Uganda. We show that farm size is negatively related to yields (output per hectare), as commonly found in the literature, but positively related to farm...

In discussing the paradoxical violation of expected utility theory that now bears his name, Maurice Allais noted that individuals tend to "greatly value" payoffs that are certain. Allais' observation would seem to imply that people will undervalue insurance relative to the predictions of...

This paper examines whether agricultural insurance can boost investment by small scale farmers in West Africa. We conduct a randomized evaluation to analyze the impacts of index insurance for cotton farmers in Burkina Faso. We find no impact of insurance on cotton, but, consistent with...

A vast firm productivity literature finds that otherwise similar firms differ widely in their productivity and that these differences persist through time, with important implications for the broader macroeconomy. These stylized facts derive largely from studies of manufacturing firms in wealthy...

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...

Large and regular seasonal price fluctuations in local grain markets appear to offer African farmers substantial inter-temporal arbitrage opportunities, but these opportunities remain largely unexploited: small-scale farmers are commonly observed to "sell low and buy high" rather than the...