This paper examines a well known empirical puzzle in the literature on technology adoption: despite the potential of technologies to increase returns dramatically, a significant fraction of households do not use these technologies. I study the use of hybrid maize and fertilizer in Kenya, where...

A model is developed for peasant households in land abundant areas who choose between two technologies for land preparation: a manual one and one using draught animals. For draught a minimum number of animals is required so that a technological non convexity exists. It follows that certain...

Much has been written on the determinants of input and technology adoption in agriculture, with issues such as input availability, knowledge and education, risk preferences, profitability, and credit constraints receiving much attention. This paper focuses on a factor that has been less well...

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is approaching eight years of implementation. Since 2006, it has offered up to 100 days per year of guaranteed public works employment to tens of millions of rural Indian households. It is intended to augment the purchasing power...

In many parts of the world, several decades of intensively applying Green Revolution technologies came at environmental costs, i.e. degraded water and soil quality as well as a loss of biodiversity. This has led to an increased interest in alternative farming systems such as organic farming,...

In the quest to reduce global under- and malnutrition, which is particularly high among smallholder farmers, agriculture-nutrition linkages have received a lot of attention in recent years. Researchers have analysed the link between the quantity of food that farmers produce and nutritional...

Digital tools may help to study socioeconomic aspects of agricultural development that are difficult to measure such as the effects of new technologies, policies and practices on the intra-household allocation of time. As new technologies, policies and practices may target different crops and...

In the quest to reduce global under- and malnutrition, which is particularly high among smallholder farmers, agriculture-nutrition linkages have received a lot of attention in recent years. Researchers have analysed the link between the quantity of food that farmers produce and nutritional...

Empirical evidence of education spillovers in developing countries and rural contexts is scarce and focuses on specific channels. This paper provides evidence of such spillovers in rural India, by evaluating the overall impact of education of neighbors on farm productivity. We use...

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...