That’s the title of a new paper by my former student Ken Lee and I, in which we study the impact of mobile phone ownership on the prices received by farmers for their onions in the Philippines.
Here is the abstract:
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 his spouse own a mobile phone is associated with a 5- to 7-percent increase in price.
In other words, it’s not whether there is a mobile phone in your household that seems to matter, it’s whether you have a mobile phone yourself (or whether your spouse does, depending on whether we keep outliers or not).