The decision to adopt an innovation is seen as dependent upon the farmer's perception of: 1) the possible return from the innovation; and 2) the probability that that possibility will, indeed, be realized. The institution's role is to provide information concerning the innovation and facilitate...

The problem of unemployment in Colombia is very important for a variety of reasons. A large portion of it can be identified as technological unemployment. This kind of unemployment is related to the technological dualism, which exists in the economy. Technological unemployment arises from...

The evaluation of USAID funded farming systems research projects must play an important role in the design of future projects if one is to build on past experience to improve project performance. The development of an institutional memory is particularly important as FSR is new and still taking...

We analyze technology adoption decisions of manufacturers in response to energy audits provided by Department of Energy Industrial Assessment Centers. Using fixed effects logit estimation to control for unobserved plant characteristics, we find that plants respond as expected to financial costs...

Most of the literature attributes credit constraints in small-farm developing-country agriculture to the variability of returns to investment in this sector. But the literature does not fully explain lenders. reluctance to finance investments in technologies that provide both higher average and...

In their 1963 classic Scarcity and Growth Howard Barnett and Chandler Morse argued that resource scarcity did not threaten economic growth. A second investigation in the late 1970s, Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered, reached largely the same conclusion. The 25 years since that work was published...

The theory of environmental regulation suggests that economic instruments, such as taxes and tradable permits, create more effective technology adoption incentives than conventional regulatory standards. We explore this issue for an important industry undergoing technological responses to a...

The paper develops a framework to evaluate permits granted to firms under the Environmental Protection Agency's Project XL -- with emphasis on the novel air permit granted to the Intel Corporation. We describe the permit, the process that created it, and the types of costs and benefits likely to...

The otherwise straightforward analysis of randomized experiments is often complicated by the presence of missing data. In such situations it is necessary to make assumptions about the dependence of the selection mechanism on treatment, response, and covariates. The widely used approach of...

In many developing country cities, clusters of small and medium enterprises create severe pollution problems. Because conventional regulatory approaches are typically ineffective in such situations, policy responses have increasingly focused on promoting voluntary clean technological change. Yet...