Due to increasing population pressure on limited cultivable land in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), farm size has been shrinking, fallow periods have been shortened, and soil fertility has been declining. In accordance with the Boserupian evolutionary theory and the Hayami-Ruttan induced...

This paper studies the relationship between land tenure for smallholder agriculture and deforestation in Viet Nam. We combine high resolution satellite data on deforestation with rich household and commune-level, biannual panel data. We study two margins of tenure security, whether a household...

I document negative externalities of air pollution in the Indian agricultural sector. Using variation in pollution induced by changes in wind across years, I show that higher levels of pollution lead to decreased agricultural productivity, with large changes in productivity being common. The...

This paper uses panel data at commune, household, and plot levels to study the causes and effects of agricultural land fragmentation in rural Viet Nam. We focus on both inter-farm fragmentation (the division of land into many small farms) and intra-farm fragmentation (the division of each farm...

Myanmar is facing climate change (CC) induced changes to the productivity of their critically important rice sector over the coming century. Moreover, the recent five-year Myanmarese Agriculture Development Strategy (ADS) sets out a vision of achieving an '…inclusive, competitive, food and...

A consistent finding in the development literature is that average non-farm labor productivity is higher than average farm labor productivity. These differences in average productivity are sometimes used to promote policies which advance the non-farm sector. In this paper, we analyze the...

According to standard economic theory, households should equate the marginal revenue product of an input across activities within the household. However, this prediction may not hold in the presence of risk. Using data on farm plots and non-farm enterprises in Malawi, we examine the impact of...

In this study we analyze the gender gap in agricultural productivity in Mozambique applying the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition approach on data from four agricultural surveys between 2002 and 2012. We find that female-headed households are on average substantially less productive (about 20 per...

We examine important changes in agriculture in Viet Nam in the context of ongoing structural changes in the economy. We use a household-level panel dataset and a quantitative framework to document the extent and consequences of factor misallocation in agriculture during the period between 2006...

Output per worker is lower in poor countries than in rich countries, and relatively more so in the agricultural sector. Sorting of heterogeneous workers can contribute to explain this fact if comparative and absolute advantage are aligned in agriculture, implying that average productivity in...