Transaction costs play a key role in the behaviour of smallholders in developing countries. We investigate smallholder tobacco cultivation in Malawi, Malawi's major export crop, and exploit the introduction of an additional tobacco auction floor to measure the impact of a reduction in...

We measure the impact of low cost transport by rail in Malawi on the dispersion of agricultural commodities prices across markets, by exploiting the quasi experimental design of the nearly total collapse of domestic trade by rail in January 2003, due to the destruction of a railway bridge at...

I use the quasi experimental nature of the roll-out of the mobile phone network in Mozambique to estimate the impact of search costs on the dispersion of maize prices and transport costs. The introduction of mobile phone services from 1997 to 2009 explains a 4.5-11% percent reduction in price...

We measure if and to what extent livestock sales during food shortages affect the wealth value of livestock. For this purpose we exploit monthly market prices of meat and staple foods in Malawi, for up to 72 locations (towns, villages and markets), for the period from January 1991 to December...

Most sub-Sahara African agriculture is rainfed and the key production risk is crop failure due to drought or insufficient rains. Major strategies for households to protect against the risk of crop failure are livestock rearing and storage of home produced food. Next to drought, SSA agriculture...