We contribute to the long debate on whether export commodity revenues can lead to economic development by studying the consequences of the nearly six-fold increase in the global price of vanilla on vanilla farming communities in Madagascar. We find a substantial increase in the wealth and...

Exogenous shocks to farmers' consumption, production and labour market decisions are rarely considered accurately. For farm households, under labour market imperfections, such decisions are often interlinked. This calls for non-separable agricultural household models. According to this...

We develop a simple theoretical model of market participation over multiple seasons in the presence of liquidity constraints and transactions costs to explain the 'sell low, buy high' puzzle wherein certain households forego opportunities for intertemporal price arbitrage through storage and are...

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...

Incompleteness of insurance markets is a crucial weakness of developing countries. In this context, the poor households of rural regions often exploit common property resources, such as forests, as insurance in case of economics stress. The aim of this paper is to derive the implications of this...

This paper shows that using yields may not be informative of the relationship between farm size and productivity in the context of small-scale farming. This occurs because, in addition to productivity, yields pick up size-dependent market distortions and decreasing returns to scale. As a result,...

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...

Credit reporting systems have become a widespread tool to assess the creditworthiness of prospective borrowers. This paper studies the implications for credit access of using them in contexts where exogenous and transitory shocks affect income and repayment. Using a novel administrative data set...

Economic models of land allocation may lead to expectations for farmer response that surprisingly" do not materialize, if market prices fail to reflect the value of farmers' product. "Shadow prices" rather than market prices explain resource allocation better for farmers who attach significant...

In this paper, we evaluate the short term impact of a Fruit Fly Eradication Program in the coastal areas of Peru. Exploiting arbitrary variation in the program's intervention borders, as well as precise geographic location data of farmer's households, we use a Geographical Regression...