Spatial Patterns of Technology Diusion: The Case of Hybrid Rice in Bangladesh

In this paper we demonstrate a method for measuring the eect of spatial interactions on the adoption of hybrid rice using a unique, nationally-representative data set from Bangladesh. Based on resulst from a generalized spatial two-stage least squares estimation, we have shown that neighbor eects are a signicant determinant of hybrid rice adoption. Further, using two specications of spatial systems, we show that having a network including nearby hybrid rice adopters is more in uential than having a network of more distant hybrid rice adopters, and that merely have a network with a large number of adopters may be relatively meaningless if they are far away.