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...

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...

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 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 development microeconomics literature. We explain reverse tenancy contracts...

It seems paradoxical that until recently, developed countries have continued subsidizing agriculture even though their agricultural sectors had been declining in relative importance since the middle of the 20th century. What drives support for agricultural protection—the broad array of...

Contract farming has frequently been shown to increase the income of participating households. Whether contract farming increases other aspects of household welfare, however, remains unclear. Using a 1,200-household data set from Madagascar and the results of a contingent valuation experiment...