Various South African policy statements and strategy proposals argue that farmer focused planning and farming systems research approaches are required to develop policies, strategies and project activities to serve farmers efficiently. Then, the question is how to give a practical content to...

Although the benefits of genetically modified (GM) crops have been well documented, how do farmers manage the risk of new technology in the early stages of technology adoption has received less attention. We compare the total factor productivity (TFP) of cotton to other major crops (wheat, rice,...

We evaluate the impact of a health information intervention implemented through mobile phones, using a clustered randomized control trial augmented by qualitative interviews. The intervention aimed to improve sexual health knowledge and shift individuals towards safer sexual behavior by...

Strategies for sustainable intensification of livestock are becoming increasingly important in designing interventions to develop the sector. In dairying systems, herd health management is among such strategies. While adoption patterns and productivity gains have been analyzed in previous...

This paper adds a fresh angle to the on-going debate on the potential negative employment effect of environmental policy by bringing to the fore a key factor that directly regulates its magnitude: the elasticity of substitution between labor and energy. Using firm-level data from the French...

In a neoclassical economy with endogenous capital- and labor-augmenting technical change the steady-state growth rate of output per worker is shown to increase in the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. This confirms the assessment of Klump and de La Grandville (2000) that the...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model to quantify the interaction between climate policy, industry dynamics, and the elasticity of substitution between clean and dirty energy in the economy. The model incorporates empirical observations that firms differ substantially in their potential...

We provide a general theoretical characterization of how technology choice affects the long-run elasticity of substitution between capital and labour. While the shape of the technology frontier determines the long-run growth path and the long-run elasticity, adjustment costs in technology choice...

We provide a general theoretical characterization of how firms' technology choice on a technology frontier determines the long-run elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. We show that the shape of the frontier determines factor shares and the elasticity of substitution between...

The non-constancy of factor shares is drawing the attention of many researchers. We document an average drop of the labour share of 8 percentage points for eight European countries and the US between 1980 and 2007. We investigate theoretically and empirically two mechanisms: the substitution...