Understanding Adoption of Soil and Water Conservation Techniques: The role of new owners

This paper analyzes the adoption behavior of small holder farmers using comparable plot-level duration data for Kenya and The Philippines. We find that adoption behavior is strongly linked to the process of land ownership transfer. This relationship is found both for data from Kenya and The Philippines and is robust to the inclusion of unobserved village, household, plot and time effects. While previous studies on adoption using duration or panel data have focused on the role of various changing village- and household-level factors, no previous adoption study has emphasized the crucial role of land ownership changes.