This is a draft paper, submitted in advance of presentation at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association.

We measured the farm-level impacts of Malawi’s Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) on fertiliser use and maize yields in central and southern Malawi. Using multiple rounds of panel data and an instrumental variable regression strategy to control for endogenous selection into the subsidy...

Replaced with revised version of paper 06/30/08.

This paper assesses improved maize adoption in Malawi and examines the link between adoption and household welfare using a three-year household panel data. The distributional effect of maize technology adoption is also investigated by looking at impacts across wealth and gender groups. We...

Although agriculture is widely regarded as a major channel through which poverty and food insecurity in Africa can be curtailed, the continent’s agricultural productivity has been abysmal. Farm input subsidy is becoming a popular policy tool that African governments are using to improve...

An important hypothesized benefit of large-scale input subsidy programs in Africa is that by raising maize production, the subsidies should put downward pressure on retail maize prices to the benefit of urban consumers and the rural poor who tend to be net food buyers. To inform debates related...

To date there is limited knowledge of how having access to post-harvest storage technology affects a smallholder African farmer’s decision to adopt higher-yielding improved maize varieties. This is a key issue because higher yielding varieties are known to be more susceptible to storage pests...

This article uses three waves of nationally representative household-level panel data from Malawi to estimate how a large-scale fertilizer subsidy program impacts the agricultural labor market, known as ganyu in that country. I find that when looking across the entire population of smallholders,...

This paper assesses rural households’ decision to use improved maize varieties in Malawi and examines its impact on household welfare using a three-year household panel data. The distributional effect of maize technology adoption is investigated by looking at impacts across wealth and gender...

This study uses nationally representative data from 360 farm households in Benin to estimate how access to storage technologies and storage losses from insects affects a smallholder African farmer’s decision to hold grain from production, in an environment of high price variability. We find...