Agricultural growth has been largely responsible for India's desire for long term food security for its rapidly growing population and making food affordable by price stabilization. It is therefore a big challenge for the policy makers to make policies which enable farmers to efficiently adjust...

About forty lakh hectare of land is under cotton cultivation in Maharashtra. Once known as the prosperous cotton-belt; today the irony is that the state tops the list when it comes to suicides by farmers. Further, almost all of them are cotton farmers mostly from Vidarbha. At present, Vidarbha...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

The study examines the influence of the respondents’ socio-economic characteristics on their adoption of crop insurance schemes. Discriminant analysis based on the criteria values of standardized canonical coefficient, correlation matrix identified that educational level, farm size,...