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

Improving farmers’ access to markets is widely recognized as a major development challenge. A review of the literature suggests that indicators of market access may bear little relationship to the specific processes of interest and hence provide misguided evidence of the impacts of improved...

Paper accepted for presentation at the 27th Conference of the International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE), Beijing China, August 16-22, 2009, (Ref 690)

Private standards are gaining in importance in global markets for high-value foods. We analyze and compare impacts of three sustainability oriented standards – Fairtrade, Organic, and UTZ – on the livelihoods of smallholder coffee farmers in Uganda. Using survey data and propensity score...

Despite evidence of the importance of differences in the source and type of information that women and men acquire, there is a persistent assumption that these gender dimensions of information acquisition are irrelevant to decision-making in cereal systems in South Asia. Yet women do play a...

Paper accepted for presentation at the 27th Conference of the International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE), Beijing China, August 16-22, 2009, (Ref 690)

Recent efforts to develop rice cultivars with drought-tolerance (DT) traits have resulted in the release of several varieties that demonstrate significant resiliency to drought stresses. In this paper, we use discrete choice experiments to examine farmers’ preferences for DT traits and explore...

Social networks play an important role in generating learning externalities that can drive the diffusion of innovative, and potentially poverty-reducing, technologies. This is particularly the case in developing countries where rural education, extension, and agricultural information services...

Efficient information exchanges between sellers and buyers are essential if prices are to act as a signal for resource allocation in an economy. In the case of seed and planting materials, information on quality traits are often difficult for consumers (farmers) to obtain prior to purchase,...