Productivity

Agroforestry, a farming system where trees are grown alongside crops, has the potential to help achieve multiple development objectives. It can help coffee farms combat climate change by acting as carbon sinks. Beyond reducing carbon emissions, agroforestry helps shield coffee plants from heat and heavy rains, increasing resilience to climate change. Further, products of agroforestry can provide important independent income stream to farmers facing extreme poverty.

Strong export performance is often seen as key to unleashing firm productivity and spurring economic growth, both for the exporting firms themselves and for the broader economy. Given these perceived benefits, middle and low-income country (LMIC) governments commonly implement export promotion policies that aim to alleviate market failures hindering export growth.

The rise of the information economy has highlighted how data may be an input into production (Veldkamp and Chung, forthcoming). Since firms conversely accumulate data through production, large firms may be able to accumulate data more quickly, giving them an advantage. The advantage is especially stark in retail, where a key dimension of productivity is the ability to forecast demand for individual products (Samaniego de la Parra and Shenoy, 2023). Walmart came to dominate U.S.

This project consists in a field experiment with randomized allocation of air purifiers in small-scale textile firms in Bangladesh to estimate firms’ and households’ willingness to pay for air purifiers.