Our research examines how the changing cultural norms and legal status in Ecuador have impacted women’s empowerment in the agricultural sector and in rural communities. Cacao provides a particularly relevant case because of its economic and ecological importance to Ecuador and the region. The...

Ecuadorian women have traditionally been sidelined from full participation in the economy and have lacked equal political rights. Yet, Ecuador has made advances in gender equality in recent years. Women now have greater access to educational and career opportunities, equality in inheritance and...

In many West African countries, large rural multigenerational households farm common household plots as well as allocate individual plots to different family members. Multiple studies have found that women plot managers achieve lower yields than men. This work uses a unique 17-year panel dataset...

Manufacturing is intensive in the use of reproducible factors and exhibits greater technological dynamism than primary production. As such its growth is central to long-run development in low-income countries. Sub-Saharan African countries are latecomers to industrialization, and barriers to...

This research determines significant characteristics that can be used to identify developing countries which are likely to receive foreign direct investment into their food retailing industry. It also tests the likelihood that a real option value exists for the investment and that there is a...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/16/04.

We develop a model of sorting and matching between borrowers and lenders across formal and informal credit markets in a developing country context. We highlight the role of risk both on credit access and sectoral choice. We examine how activity and sectoral choice vary across agents with...

This paper examines growth in the U.S. agricultural sector under the conditions hypothesized by endogenous growth theory. Public capital and R&D are explicitly considered to capture the effects of public inputs in a model based on dynamic duality theory. Results support some necessary conditions...

We measure impacts of agricultural intensification on environmental outcomes in the Philippines. We develop models of labor demand outside a forest zone and labor allocation and asset accumulation inside a forest zone to study household response to technical change. Using household data from...