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Category: Agriculture

Published January 8, 2013

Mobile Phones, Agricultural Prices, and the Intrahousehold Allocation of Technology

That’s the title of my most recent article, which was published by the Journal of Development Studies just before the holidays:

Using data from the Philippines, we study the impact of mobile phones on the prices agricultural producers receive for their cash crop. We first look at the impact on price of mobile phone ownership at the household level. Because this masks a considerable amount of heterogeneity, we then look at the impact on price of the intrahousehold allocation of mobile phones. We find that whether the household owns a mobile phone has no impact on price, but whether a farmer or spouse owns a mobile phone is associated with a 5- to 8-per cent increase in price.

For those of you without an institutional subscription, here is an ungated version of the paper.

If you are looking for longer discussions of the paper, I have blogged about it here and here.

Published December 3, 2012

Managing Basis Risk with Index Insurance in West Africa

Exposure to risk is one of life’s few certitudes. For people who live in developing countries, where underdevelopment almost always extends to financial markets, and where financial instruments to hedge against risk are fewer and further between than in industrialized countries, risk is even more prevalent. The rise of microfinance over the last 20 years has brought about the development of financial instruments designed to protect the poor against some of the risk they face. We first develop an innovative index insurance contract for West African cotton producers, whose harvests are highly variable. The main feature of this contract is that relative to commonly used index insurance contracts, it considerably reduces the basis risk faced by West African cotton producers. We then describe an ongoing evaluation of the impacts of the double-trigger insurance contract in Mali and Burkina Faso.

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Published November 27, 2012

Food Prices and Agricultural Research

In my post yesterday, I listed some of the policy options available to curb rising food prices. Third among those options was to “encourage (public) agricultural research, which has practically ground to a halt since the 1980s.”

This week, Science published a very important article by the US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service’s Keith Fuglie and coauthors, in which the authors look at the role of private agricultural research. The title of the article is “The Contribution of Private Industry to Agricultural Innovation,” and the abstract is as follows:

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