Farm data has been a contentious point of debate with respect to ownership rights and impacts when access rights are misappropriated. One of the leading questions farmers ask deals with the protections provided to farm data. Although no specific laws or precedence exists, the possibility of...

Economic and population growth increasingly pressure the Earth system. Fertile soils are essential to ensure global food security, requiring high-yielding agro-technological regimes to cope with rising soil degradation and macro-nutrients deficiencies, which may be further exacerbated by climate...

Agricultural production is often exposed to several sources of risks, uncertainties and random shocks. These risks and random shocks make the evaluation the influence of policy interventions in the agricultural sector difficult due to the existence of limited data about random events....

The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of economic informality and its application in the rural context of developing and transitional economies, applying Keith Hart's (1987) notion of informality as a 'remedial concept'. Some remedy is needed to make sense of the many 'palpable...

Motivated by the conclusions from various modelling studies, modifications to the bioenergy sector regulations are under way in Europe and in the USA to account for emissions from indirect land-use change (ILUC). Despite their influence on the policy-making, evaluations of the capacity of...

The complexity of managing physical and financial risk throughout the commodity production, processing and merchandising chain presents numerous challenges. To solve this problem commercials are increasingly turning to Energy and Commodity Transaction Risk Management (E/CTRM) systems. Still,...

Do constraints to technology adoption vary by behavioral traits? We randomize 150 villages in Bangladesh into being offered standard microcredit, loans with a grace period, the choice between those two contracts, and control. No discernible average effects are detected on the adoption of...

This paper investigates an empirical puzzle in technology adoption: the observation that farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa who have successfully adopted modern agricultural inputs on their farms tend to spread synergistic inputs across plots rather than combining them. Existing theories are unable...

This paper analyses the pathways of technology diffusion through social networks, following the experimental introduction of new technologies in Guinea-Bissau. In the context of an agricultural extension project, we document both the direct effects of this intervention and subsequent diffusion...

Do constraints to technology adoption vary by behavioral traits? We randomize 150 villages in Bangladesh into being offered standard microcredit, loans with a grace period, the choice between those two contracts, and control. No discernible average effects are detected on the adoption of...