What is the impact of participation in agricultural value chains on the welfare of smallholders? Contract farming, wherein a processing firm delegates its production of agricultural commodities to growers, is often viewed as a means of increasing smallholder welfare in developing countries....

There is an important literature on the causal relationship flowing from the quality of institutions to economic performance. This paper studies this relationship at the micro level by looking at the productivity impacts of land rights. Whereas previous studies used proxies for soil quality and...

Why do some individuals pirate digital music while others pay for it? Using data on a sample of undergraduate students, we study the determinants of music piracy by looking at whether a respondent’s last song was obtained illegally or not. In doing so, we incorporate (i) the...

Over the past five years or so, applied economists have been relying increasingly on subjective perceptions to explain behavior. In Bellemare (2009a, 2009b) I elicited from landlords subjective perception of tenurial insecurity as a result of the land tenancy contract they signed with their...

This paper tests whether agricultural extension and imperfect supervision - conflated here into the number of visits by a technical assistant - increase productivity at the margin in a sample of contract farming arrangements between a processing firm and small agricultural producers in...

Under the usual assumption that the landlord is risk-neutral and the tenant is risk-averse, sharecropping is second-best in that it trades off risk sharing and incentives and leads to a constrained Pareto-efficient agreement. Many, however, have reported instances of reverse share tenancy, i.e.,...

The inverse productivity-size relationship is one of the oldest puzzles in development economics. Two conventional explanations for the inverse relationship have emerged in the literature: (i) factor market imperfections that cause cross-sectional variation in household-specific shadow prices...

While most studies looking at the consequences of tenurial insecurity on land markets in developing countries focus on the effects of tenurial insecurity on the investment behavior of landowners, this paper studies the hitherto unexplored relationship between tenurial insecurity and contract...

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...

Across the social sciences, lagged explanatory variables are a common strategy to confront challenges to causal identification using observational data. We show that “lag identification” — the use of lagged explanatory variables to solve endogeneity problems — is an illusion: lagging...