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.
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.
Large and regular seasonal price fluctuations in local grain markets appear to offer African farmers substantial intertemporal arbitrage opportunities, but these opportunities remain largely unexploited.
This project aims to rigorously identify what type of market arrangements and infrastructure provide the most sustainable environment for agricultural rental markets of equipment to arise, or how the entry of formal rental opportunities impact informal renting arrangements.
This project studies the effect of productivity growth in agriculture through the adoption of a new technology, genetically modified soybean seeds, on industrial development in Brazil.
