The sharing economy for a wide range of goods and services is expanding across the world. To direct the benefits from sharing capital services towards small-scale producers, governments in the developing world are increasingly intervening in fast-growing mechanization rental markets. However,...

The livelihoods of the majority of the world's poor depend on agriculture. They face substantial risk from fluctuations in weather conditions. Better risk, credit and savings markets can improve productivity and welfare in rural areas but entail high administrative costs. We consider a classic...

Agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) lags far behind all other regions of the world. A long list of policy experiments has yielded more evidence on what fails than on what works. We analyze a randomized control trial of a rare scaled-up success story: One Acre Fund's small...

The boll weevil spread across the Southern United States from 1892 to 1922 having a devastating impact on cotton cultivation. The resulting shift away from this child labor-intensive crop lowered the opportunity cost of attending school, and thus the pest increased school enrollment and...

We study the effects of globalization on agricultural productivity across countries. We develop a multi-country general equilibrium model that incorporates choices of crops and technologies in agricultural production at the micro-level of fields covering the surface of the earth. We estimate our...

U.S. agriculture was transformed during the 20th century by waves of innovation with mechanical, biological, chemical, and information technologies. Compared with a few decades ago, today's agriculture is much less labor intensive and farms are much larger and more specialized, supplying a...

Why is agricultural productivity so low in poor countries relative to the rest of the world? Is it due to geography or constrained economic choices? We assess the quantitative role of geography and land quality for agricultural productivity differences across countries using high-resolution...

This paper provides evidence of the long-run effects of a permanent increase in agricultural productivity on conflict. We construct a newly digitized and geo-referenced dataset of battles in Europe, the Near East and North Africa covering the period between 1400 and 1900 CE. For variation in...

We assess the role of land markets on factor misallocation in Ethiopia--where land is owned by the state--by exploiting policy-driven variation in land rentals across time and space arising from a recent land certification reform. Our main finding from detailed micro data is that land rentals...

We assess the CO₂ fertilization effect on US agriculture using spatially-varying CO₂ data from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite covering the majority of US cropland under actual growing conditions. This study complements the many CO₂ enrichment experiments that have found...