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...

Transaction costs play a key role in the behaviour of smallholders in developing countries. We exploit the quasi experimental design of the introduction of an additional tobacco auction floor in Malawi in order to investigate the impact of a reduction in transaction costs and improved market...

We measure the impact of the Farmers Income Diversification Program (FIDP), an EU funded program implemented in Malawi from late 2005 onwards, aiming at increasing agricultural productivity, diversification, value addition, commercialization and trade of subsistence farmers. The geographical...

We exploit plot data from the agricultural module of the third Malawi Integrated Household Survey (IHS-3) to investigate how organic cultivation techniques contribute to productivity of non-subsidized local maize and what to expect from using organic inputs on a larger scale. We approximate...

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...

The survival of firms under changes in the business environment caused by exogenous shocks can be explained using economic Darwinism. Exogenous shocks can cause 'cleansing effects'. Shocks clean out unproductive firms so that available resources are allocated to the remaining more productive...

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 investigate to what extent the roll-out of the mobile phone network in Mozambique reduced transport costs and search costs, and thereby decreased spatial price dispersion and improved market efficiency. Estimations are based on data of transport costs of maize grain and maize market prices....

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...

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...