The identification of the optimal selling time of stored goods is among the most essential eco-nomic decisions on a farm. Beyond monetary aspects, behavioral factors may influence farmers' selling behavior. In financial economics, the disposition effect is a commonly observed phenomenon. It...

A farmer’s uncertainty preferences can play a large role in how he makes production decisions on the farm. We attempt to understand how farmers’ household characteristics as well as past harvest shocks affect uncertainty preferences of maize farmers in southern Mexico. By using a series of...

Smallholder farmers in developing countries are particularly vulnerable to climate shocks but often lack access to insurance. Weather index insurance (WII) is a promising innovation, but uptake has been lower than expected. WII contracts are not yet sufficiently tailored to the needs and...

Land requisition has been an important process by which Chinese local governments promote urbanization and generate revenue. This study investigates the impacts of land requisition on farmers' decisions of labor allocation between agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. We argue that,...

Many development programs are based on short-term interventions, either because of external funding constraints or because it is assumed that impacts persist post program termination ("sustainability"). Using a novel randomized phase-out research method, we provide experimental tests of the...

It is a well-known fact that a great majority of countries implement agricultural input subsidies as a tool to boost agricultural productivity and output. However, even though this practice is widely spread and represents a large part of the agricultural budget, little emphasis has been placed...

Since the 1960s, Ethiopia has been inducing changes in its approaches to agricultural extension through reforms. In 2010, the Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources adopted a Participatory Extension System. Farmers' group formation accompanies the reform process. This paper analyzes and...

Agricultural information is transferred through social interactions; therefore, ties to agricultural informants and network structures within farmers’ local neighborhoods determine their information-gathering abilities. This paper uses a spatial autoregressive model that takes account of...

Like other Sahel countries, Senegal experienced a succession of food and nutrition crises in 2005, 2008, 2010 and 2012. In 2012, severe food insecurity affected around 739,000 people, corresponding to 6.2 per cent of the Senegalese population. Nutrition surveys conducted in 2012 showed overall...

Minimum tillage combined with mulching (MTM) is critical to conservation agriculture, yet its use by smallholder farmers raises challenging questions regarding adoption, diffusion and scaling at farm level. In this paper, we used probit regression and post-estimation simulations to identify the...

This study addresses factors influencing the adoption of specialty rice variety among smallholder farmers in Vietnam. We used a sample of 336 farmers from the Red River Delta who were interviewed between October and December 2014. We follow the adoption behavior model based on the utility...

The present study develops an equilibrium displacement model (EDM) to evaluate the impacts of a free trade agreement (FTA) on the profits of individual farmers. The parameters representing the share of profit within revenue and the elasticity of cost with respect to quantity in the cost function...

Most of the literature on vertical coordination and its impact on farm performance and farmer wellbeing deal with high-value or modern food supply chains, including export chains and chains dominated by large international supermarkets or other forms of foreign direct investment. The impact of...

Farmers' preferences for sustainability certification are analyzed, building on a choice experiment conducted with smallholder coffee growers in Uganda. Farmers have positive general attitudes towards certification. While they dislike bans of productivity-enhancing inputs, benefits associated...

This study employed the Cobb-Douglas stochastic frontier production function to measure the level of technical efficiency among smallholder cassava farmers in Central Madagascar. A multi-stage random sampling technique was used to select 180 cassava farmers in the region and from this sample,...

This thesis contributes to the understanding of the economic decision making of farmers. In five chapters, different experimental investigations of preferences and cognitive biases are presented. Various experimental measures of risk and time preference are applied to analyze farmers’...

We explore the role of an individual's historical lineage in determining economic status, holding constant his or her current location. This is complementary to the more common approach to studying how history shapes economic outcomes across locations. Motivated by a large literature in social...

After the 2007-08 food crisis, addressing high and volatile cereal prices became a priority for national governments in Sub-Saharan Africa because of their key role in determining consumption and income of poor smallholders. Nevertheless, the lack of information and some misperceptions on the...

Purpose of this paper is to identify the tendency of shrimp value chain development and impact of its governance on the small scale shrimp farmers in Vietnam. Design/methodology/approach - Data from the shrimp farmers surveys in Mekong delta, Vietnam from 2008-2010 with the update information in...

We analyse the impact of a junior farmer field school project in Northern Uganda on students’ agricultural knowledge and practices. We also test for the presence of intergenerational learning spillover within households. We use differences-in-differences estimators with ex-ante matching. We...

The paper highlights the involvement of field research in achieving a model farm calves for fattening and associated with basic fodder popularizing information and for practical use, which is necessary for young farmers first install the head / manager of a holding in a production animal...

There is an increasing political interest in Hungary to relocalize food. A Policy Intervention for Food Relocalization Index is introduced to quantitatively reveal how rural development programme measures should be allocated efficiently to promote local food production. Results show that present...

This paper explores the impacts of traditional agricultural insurance that offers protection against climatic shocks on small-scale tobacco farmers in Colombia. We analyze the impacts of access to the insurance on household financial outcomes after a period of severe climatic events that caused...

Several elicitation techniques were employed to gauge the attitudes to risk of smallholder high-value crop farmers in the southern Philippines. Results showed varying degrees of risk aversion, neutrality, and preference among smallholder farmers. Although some of the techniques classified...

In this paper, we use semi-structured interviews with firm representatives and original survey data to study the factors influencing farmers' participation in modern supply chains in the Ecuadorian blackberry sector. Previous research has emphasized the important role of farm size and non-farm...

The discount rate is of great importance for all decisions in an intertemporal context, such as the decision of how much a society invests in environmental preservation, or the financial decisionmaking on the individual level. This study experimentally investigates the time preferences of...

This paper presents the impact evaluation of CRIAR program, implemented in rural areas in Bolivia. The objective of CRIAR is to increase smallholders' agricultural income and food security through productivity improvements triggered by technological adoption. In this study, we use data from a...

Structural changes in the global agrifood value chain have transformed food production in developing countries including Indonesia. One element of this is the spread of supermarket retailing. By increasing the demand for and returns to higher quality produce, this development has the potential...

The value of membership of an agricultural producer cooperative to a farmer is universally understood to include market access, improved bargaining power, and reduced transaction costs. As a result of consolidation in agriculture, many farmers in developed countries have found themselves in...

Many economic decision situations of foresters and farmers are characterized by risk. Thereby, the individual risk attitude is of particular interest for understanding decision behaviour and, thus, is fundamental for valuable policy recommendations. The literature provides various methods to...

This article compares the use of risk-increasing and risk-reducing production inputs with the experimentally measured risk attitudes of farmers. For this purpose, the Just-Pope production function indicates production inputs’ influence on output risk and a Holt-Laury lottery is used to measure...

The recent expansion of oil palm in Indonesia is largely smallholder-driven. However, its socio-economic implications are under-examined. Analyzing farm-household data from Jambi Province, Sumatra, oil palm adoption is found to have positive consumption and nutrition effects. However, these...