Despite the presumed importance of a strong state in the development process, there has been very little empirical work assessing the state’s ability to exercise power in isolated areas and understanding the means through which the state exerts that power. This paper begins to fill this gap in...

Reverse share tenancy, wherein poorer landlords rent out land to richer tenants on shares, is a common phenomenon. Yet it does not fit existing theoretical models of sharecropping and has never before been modeled in the economics literature. We explain share tenancy contracts using an asset...

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...

Do rural households in developing countries make market participation and volume decisions simultaneously or sequentially? This article develops a two-stage econometric method to test between these two competing hypotheses regarding household-level marketing behavior. The first stage models the...

Sharecropping between poor landlords and rich tenants has hitherto been the subject of very little academic scrutiny. Given that such 'reverse share tenancy' contracts are mostly at odds with the canonical risk-sharing explanation for sharecropping, this article discusses a rationale for them...

Tests of risk sharing in the contracting literature often rely on wealth as a proxy for risk aversion. The intuition behind these tests is that since contract choice is monotonic in the coefficients of risk aversion, which are themselves assumed monotonic in wealth, the effect of a change in...

Most studies of tenurial insecurity focus on its effects on investment. This paper studies the hitherto unexplored relationship between tenurial insecurity and land tenancy contracts. Based on distinct features of formal law and customary rights in Madagascar, this paper augments the canonical...

Do rural households in developing countries make market participation and volume decisions simultaneously or sequentially? This article develops a two-stage econometric method to test between these two competing hypotheses regarding household-level marketing behavior. The first stage models the...