We examine constraints to adoption of new technologies in the context of hillside irrigation schemes in Rwanda. We leverage a plot-level spatial regression discontinuity design to produce 3 key results. First, irrigation enables dry season horticultural production, which boosts on-farm cash...

In order to induce farmers to adopt a productive new agricultural technology, we apply simple and complex contagion diffusion models on rich social network data from 200 villages in Malawi to identify seed farmers to target and train on the new technology. A randomized controlled trial compares...

Formal analysis plans limit false discoveries by registering and multiplicity adjusting statistical tests. As each registered test reduces power on other tests, researchers prune hypotheses based on prior knowledge, often by combining related indicators into evenly-weighted indices. We propose...

Preanalysis plans (PAPs) have become an important tool for limiting false discoveries in field experiments. We evaluate the properties of an alternate approach which splits the data into two samples: An exploratory sample and a confirmation sample. When hypotheses are homogeneous, we describe an...