Michael Kremer is University Professor in Economics, the College, and the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He holds a PhD in Economics from Harvard University.
Mobile phones are almost universally available, and the costs of information transmission are low. They are used by smallholder farmers in low-income countries, largely successfully, to optimize markets for their produce. Fabregas et al.
The shift from subsistence to commercial economies creates surplus, but often induces conflict over it. Under extractive institutions and weak contract enforcement, crony capitalism may emerge and limit the benefits of modernization.
Sending SMS messages with agricultural advice to smallholder farmers increased yields by 11.5% relative to a control group with no messages. These effects are concentrated among farmers who had no agronomy training and had little interaction with sugar cane company staff at baseline.
A randomized experiment run in partnership with a large agri-business sugar company in Kenya shows that a mobile-based query system can improve the company's performance in the management of the provision of inputs to the company’s cane suppliers and generate positive geographic spillovers.