The Indian state of Punjab, which initially benefited greatly from the Green Revolution, has suffered from a dramatic rise in agrarian suicides for several decades. We use a carefully constructed sample of over one thousand farmers in the epicenter, and build a three-stage model of agricultural...

Microinsurance adoption in developing countries is low, despite its potential to foster economic growth. Recent research is not able to explain the low take-up rates within the neoclassical framework. I contribute to this stream of research by proposing rational as well as boundedly rational...

This paper uses data on farmers' price expectations from a survey of randomly sampled smallholder farmers in Mozambique. Survey data show that across all crops most interviewed farmers expect prices to be higher in the lean season. Yet, farmers report selling most of their output shortly after...

We use newly-available Indian panel data to estimate how the returns to planting-stage investments vary by rainfall realizations. We show that the forecasts significantly affect farmer investment decisions and that these responses account for a substantial fraction of the inter-annual...

We use newly-available Indian panel data to estimate how the returns to planting-stage investments vary by rainfall realizations. We show that the forecasts significantly affect farmer investment decisions and that these responses account for a substantial fraction of the inter-annual...

The inverse productivity-size relationship is one of the oldest puzzles in development economics. Two conventional explanations for the inverse relationship have emerged in the literature: (i) factor market imperfections that cause cross-sectional variation in household-specific shadow prices...

Farmers may use financial market instruments to hedge price risks. Moreover, various types of insurance products are on the market to protect against production losses. An insurance that covers losses of both input and output prices was recently introduced in the USA. We develop this concept...

Index-insurance is becoming increasingly popular because of its ability to provide low-cost, relatively easy to implement agricultural insurance for vegetation types whose productivity has been notoriously difficult to measure and to farmers in less-developed nations where traditional crop...