Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
16,593
result(s) for
"FARM HOUSEHOLDS"
Sort by:
Cultivating success in the South : farm households in the postbellum era
\"This book explores changes in rural households of the Georgia Piedmont through the material culture of farmers as they transitioned from self-sufficiency to market dependence. The period between 1880 and 1910 was a time of dynamic change when Southern farmers struggled to reinvent their lives and livelihoods. Relying on primary documents, including probate inventories, tax lists, state and federal census data, and estate sale results, this study seeks to understand the variables that prompted farm households to assume greater risk in hopes of success as well as those factors that stood in the way of progress. While there are few projects of this type for the late nineteenth century, and fewer still for the New South, the findings challenge the notion of farmers as overly conservative consumers and call into question traditional views of conspicuous consumption as a key indicator of wealth and status\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Agricultural cooperatives and farm sustainability – A literature review
We present a literature review of the role played by agricultural cooperatives in influenc-ing farm sustainability. We first focus on the theoretical literature to highlight the various economicbehaviours of cooperatives. Then we investigate all three dimensions of sustainability in developingand developed countries. We aim at linking the empirical findings to the theoretical understandingof cooperatives, in particular members' heterogeneity. This paper shows that cooperatives playa non-negligible role in farm economic sustainability and in the adoption of environmentallyfriendly practices, suggesting that both public policies and private initiatives in cooperatives maybe complementary. As regards social sustainability, there are only a few studies existing on the roleof agricultural cooperatives. The trade-off between economic and environmental sustainability incooperatives would need to be further investigated.
Paper
Agri-food Value Chain Revolutions in Low– and Middle-Income Countries
Agri-food value chains (AVCs) intermediate the flow of products between largely rural farmers, fisherfolk, or herders and increasingly urban consumers. The theoretical models that historically structured research on the economic development process assumed away AVC functions, however, and AVC firms and workers were necessarily omitted from the household data that generated most empirical findings in the agricultural and development economics literatures. As a result, the discipline has somewhat overlooked the rapid growth and structural change in AVCs over the past few decades that turned AVCs into major employers and sources of value addition, as well as key loci for technology transfer and foreign investment. This paper offers an integrated, structured, empirical narrative of how and why AVC revolutions occur in developing countries, the impacts of those changes, and the abundant economic research opportunities these structural changes afford economists.
Journal Article
Can Network Theory-Based Targeting Increase Technology Adoption?
Can targeting information to network-central farmers induce more adoption of a new agricultural technology? By combining social network data and a field experiment in 200 villages in Malawi, we find that targeting central farmers is important to spur the diffusion process. We also provide evidence of one explanation for why centrality matters: a diffusion process governed by complex contagion. Our results are consistent with a model in which many farmers need to learn from multiple people before they adopt themselves. This means that without proper targeting of information, the diffusion process can stall and technology adoption remains perpetually low.
Journal Article
Can Agricultural Cooperatives Reduce Poverty? Heterogeneous Impact of Cooperative Membership on Farmers' Welfare in Rwanda
We analyze the inclusiveness and effectiveness of agricultural cooperatives in Rwanda. We estimate mean income and poverty effects of cooperative membership using propensity score matching techniques. We analyze heterogeneous treatment effects across farmers by analyzing how estimated treatment effects vary over farm and farmer characteristics and over the estimated propensity score. We find that cooperative membership in general increases income and reduces poverty and that these effects are largest for larger farms and in more remote areas. We find evidence of a negative selection because impact is largest for farmers with the lowest propensity to be a cooperative member.
Journal Article
MISALLOCATION, SELECTION, AND PRODUCTIVITY
We use household-level panel data from China and a quantitative framework to document the extent and consequences of factor misallocation in agriculture. We find that there are substantial within-village frictions in both the land and capital markets linked to land institutions in rural China that disproportionately constrain the more productive farmers. These frictions reduce aggregate agricultural productivity by affecting two key margins: (1) the allocation of resources across farmers (misallocation) and (2) the allocation of workers across sectors, in particular the type of farmers who operate in agriculture (selection). Selection substantially amplifies the productivity effect of distortionary policies by affecting occupational choices that worsen average ability in agriculture.
Journal Article
Revisiting the Farm Size-Productivity Relationship Based on a Relatively Wide Range of Farm Sizes
This paper revisits the inverse farm size-productivity relationship in Kenya. The study makes two contributions. First, the relationship is examined over a much wider range of farm sizes than most studies, which is particularly relevant in Africa given the recent rise of medium-and large-scale farms. Second, we test the inverse relationship hypothesis using three different measures of productivity including profits per hectare and total factor productivity, which are arguably more meaningful than standard measures of productivity such as yield or gross output per hectare. We find a U-shaped relationship between farm size and all three measures of farm productivity. The inverse relationship hypothesis holds on farms between zero and 3 hectares. The relationship between farm size and productivity is relatively flat between 3 and 5 hectares. A strong positive relationship between farm size and productivity emerges within the 5 to 70 hectare range of farm sizes. Across virtually all measures of productivity, farms between 20 and 70 hectares are found to be substantially more productive than farms under 5 hectares. When the analysis is confined to fields cultivated to maize (Kenya’s main food crop) the productivity advantage of relatively large farms stems at least partially from differences in technical choice related to mechanization, which substantially reduces labor input per hectare, and from input use intensity.
Journal Article
The Size Distribution of Farms and International Productivity Differences
We study the determinants of differences in farm size across countries and their impact on agricultural and aggregate productivity using a quantitative sectoral model featuring a distribution of farms. Measured aggregate factors (capital, land, economy-wide productivity) account for one-quarter of the observed differences in farm size and productivity. Policies and institutions that misallocate resources across farms have the potential to account for the remaining differences. Exploiting within-country variation in crop-specific price distortions and their correlation with farm size, we construct a cross-country measure of farm-size distortions which together with aggregate factors accounts for one-half of the cross-country differences in size and productivity.
Journal Article
AGRICULTURAL DECISIONS AFTER RELAXING CREDIT AND RISK CONSTRAINTS
The investment decisions of small-scale farmers in developing countries are conditioned by their financial environment. Binding credit market constraints and incomplete insurance can limit investment in activities with high expected profits. We conducted several experiments in northern Ghana in which farmers were randomly assigned to receive cash grants, grants of or opportunities to purchase rainfall index insurance, or a combination of the two. Demand for index insurance is strong, and insurance leads to significantly larger agricultural investment and riskier production choices in agriculture. The binding constraint to farmer investment is uninsured risk: when provided with insurance against the primary catastrophic risk they face, farmers are able to find resources to increase expenditure on their farms. Demand for insurance in subsequent years is strongly increasing with the farmer’s own receipt of insurance payouts, with the receipt of payouts by others in the farmer’s social network and with recent poor rain in the village. Both investment patterns and the demand for index insurance are consistent with the presence of important basis risk associated with the index insurance, imperfect trust that promised payouts will be delivered and overweighting recent events.
Journal Article
An Analysis of Price vs. Revenue Protection: Government Subsidies in the Agriculture Industry
The agriculture industry plays a critical role in the U.S. economy, and various industry sectors depend on the output of farms. To protect and raise farmers’ income, the U.S. government offers two subsidy programs to farmers: the Price Loss Coverage (PLC) program, which pays farmers a subsidy when the market price falls below a reference price, and the Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) program, which is triggered when farmers’ revenue is below a threshold. Given the unique features of PLC and ARC, we develop models to analyze their impacts on consumers, farmers, and the government. Our analysis generates several insights. First, while PLC always motivates farmers to plant more acres compared to the no-subsidy case, farmers may plant fewer acres under ARC, leading to a lower crop supply. Second, despite the prevailing intuition that ARC generally dominates PLC, we show that both farmers and consumers may be better off under PLC for a large range of parameter values, even when the reference price represents the historical average market price. Third, the subsidy that increases consumer surplus results in higher government expenditure. Finally, we calibrate our model with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data and provide insights about the effects of crop and market characteristics on the relative performance of PLC and ARC. We provide guidelines to farmers for enrolling crops in the subsidy programs, and show that our guidelines are supported by farmers’ enrollment statistics. We also show that if the economic and political frictions caused by running the subsidy programs is significant, the subsidy that benefits both consumers and farmers may actually result in lower social welfare.
The online appendix is available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2927
.
This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.
Journal Article