Salinity in surface waters is on the rise throughout much of the world. Many factors contribute to this change, including increased water extraction, poor irrigation management, and sea-level rise. To date no study has attempted to quantify the impacts on global food production. This paper...

Agriculture remains an important economic sector in Africa, employing a large share of the labor force and earning foreign exchange. Among others, transport connectivity has long been a crucial constraint in Africa. In theory, railways have a particularly important role to play in shipping...

This paper exploits the social organization of India to revisit the question of education spillovers in farm productivity. The fact that social interactions mainly occur within castes in rural India provides tools to show that the observed correlation between farm productivity and neighbors'...

This paper provides evidence on the impacts of agricultural productivity on employment growth and structural transformation of non-farm activities. To guide the empirical work, this paper develops a general equilibrium model that emphasizes distinctions among non-farm activities in terms of...

The 2014-15 Ebola epidemic took a devastating human and economic toll on three West African countries, of which Liberia was perhaps the hardest hit. The pathways through which the crisis affected economic activity in these largely agrarian societies remain poorly understood. To study these...

Africa is estimated to have great potential for agricultural production, but there are a number of constraints inhibiting the development of that potential. Spatial data are increasingly important in the realization of potential as well as the associated constraints. With crop production data...

This paper provides evidence on the effects of agricultural productivity on wage rates, labor supply to market oriented activities, and labor allocation between own farming and wage labor in agriculture. To guide the empirical work, this paper develops a general equilibrium model that...

This paper proposes an estimator for the endogenous switching regression models with fixed effects. The estimator allows for endogenous selection and for conditional heteroscedasticity in the outcome equation. Applying the estimator to a dataset on the productivity in agriculture substantially...

This study estimates and compares the effects of small and large irrigation dams on cropland productivity in South Africa. To this end, a panel data set of South African river basins is constructed. The econometric analysis reveals that although large dams increase cropland productivity...

With farms cultivating tens or hundreds of thousands of hectares, Ukraine is often used to demonstrate the existence of economies of scale in modern grain production. Panel data analysis for all the country's farms with more than 200 hectares in 2001-2011 suggests that higher yields and profits...