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Fieldwork

Price Uncertainty Experiments (Peru, 2016)

My long-standing interest in food price volatility has made me study the problem from various angles. One such angle was to look at the welfare impacts of food price volatility for rural households in Ethiopia; another was to look at whether food price volatility was what caused food riots during the food crises of 2008 and 2011. After years of grappling with reviewers about empirical identification issues, I decided to go for the gold standard and look at the problem experimentally. Since late 2014, I have been running experiments aimed at studying the effect of output price volatility on producers with my PhD student Yu Na Lee and my coauthor David Just. After running our experiments in two locations in the US, we decided to run them in the field with farmers. To do so, we are working with IPA‘s Peru office.

Lab experiments for this project were funded by a Grant in Aid from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research at the University of Minnesota. Lab-in-the-field experiments are funded by a research grant from the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota. A pre-analysis plan was filed for this project with the AEA.

Quinoa (Peru, 2014-2015)

A post I wrote in early 2013 went viral and got the attention of folks at the International Trade Center in Geneva, who asked me and my colleague Seth Gitter to submit a proposal for a project aimed at studying the welfare impacts of changes in the price of quinoa on Andean communities. In order to study the economics of quinoa, we collected quarterly data on a sample of 150 agricultural households in the Puno and Cusco regions of Peru.

Contract Farming (Madagascar, 2008)

In 2008, my colleague David Stifel and I were contracted to study contract farming, also known as grower-processor contracts. The goal of this project was to determine whether participation in contract farming arrangements implied higher levels of welfare for the households involved. In order to study contract farming, we collected household-, village-, and firm-level data in six regions of Madagascar. I am making all survey questionnaires available to other researchers.

Land Tenancy (Madagascar, 2004)

I spent most of 2004 in Madagascar collecting data on land tenancy for my Ph.D. dissertation. The goal of this project was to test between competing theories of reverse share tenancy, i.e., the institution in which poor landlords enter sharecropping with rich tenants. In order to study reverse share tenancy, I collected household- and village-level data in 12 villages in six communes around Lac Alaotra.

I am making my data and survey questionnaires available to other researchers with the understanding that (i) I will only provide data support as time allows; and (ii) any work published using these data should acknowledge my contribution in collecting these data.

My work for this project was funded by the National Science Foundation through Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant SES-0350713, by the United States Agency for International Development through grant LAG-A-00-96-90016-00 to the BASIS Collaborative Research Support Program, and by the Social Science Research Council’s Program in Applied Economics with funds provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.