This paper addresses the apparent paradox between widespread support of cattle farming by agricultural policy interventions and negative returns to cattle as stressed in recent works. Using a representative panel dataset for Andhra Pradesh, a state in the south of India, we examine average and...

This paper addresses the apparent paradox between widespread support of cattle farming by agricultural policy interventions and negative returns to cattle as stressed in recent works. Using a representative panel dataset for Andhra Pradesh, a state in the south of India, we examine average and...

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is approaching eight years of implementation. Since 2006, it has offered up to 100 days per year of guaranteed public works employment to tens of millions of rural Indian households. It is intended to augment the purchasing power...

India and China have the largest farm-household populations in the world and in many areas also the poorest. Among the many factors that affect farm livelihoods access to credit has been identified as a significant barrier. While there has been a significant literature on credit constraints in...

Recognition of the potentially deleterious implications of inequality in opportunity originating in a skewed asset distribution has spawned considerable interest in land reforms. However, little attention has been devoted to the fact that, in the longer-term, the measures used to implement land...

We look at the effects of rainfall forecasts and realized rainfall on equilibrium agricultural wages over the course of the agricultural production cycle. We show theoretically that a forecast of good weather can lower wages in the planting stage, by lowering ex ante out-migration, and can...

This paper addresses the apparent paradox between widespread support of cattle farming by agricultural policy interventions and negative returns to cattle as stressed in recent works. Using a representative panel dataset for Andhra Pradesh, a state in the south of India, we examine average and...

While the regulation of tenancy arrangements is widespread in the developing world, evidence on how such regulation influences the long-run allocation of land and labor remains limited. To provide such evidence, this paper exploits quasi-random assignment of linguistically similar areas to...

We examine the impact of a six-fold increase in the global vanilla price on smallholder vanilla-farming households in Madagascar. The price increase leads to sizable gains in household assets and significant improvements in adult psychological well-being, cognitive performance, and optimism...

We use newly-available Indian panel data to estimate how the returns to planting-stage investments vary by rainfall realizations. We show that the forecasts significantly affect farmer investment decisions and that these responses account for a substantial fraction of the inter-annual...