Abstract: In 2010, primary school in Malawi began in September, three months earlier than in 2009. I show that this change forced households to sell crops early, when prices are low. The effect is limited to households with school children, increases with the number of children, and is present only for poor households. Households that […]
Virtual event: Sell Low, Buy Low? A New Explanation for a Persistent Puzzle
Abstract: We provide new insight into the seeming puzzle that many farmers in low-income countries sell their crops at harvest, when prices are low, rather than waiting until prices increase later in the year. We use 20 years of data from 1037 retail markets in 30 African countries to demonstrate that the lean season price […]
Virtual Event: Follow the Leader? A Field Experiment on Social Influence
Abstract: We conduct an artefactual field experiment in endogenously formed groups in rural Malawi to investigate social influence in risk taking. Treatments vary whether individuals observe the behavior of a formally elected leader, an external leader, or a random peer. Results show social influence in risk taking with differential influence by leader type. The decisions […]
Virtual event: Labor Calendars and Rural Poverty: A Case Study for Malawi
Abstract: The persistence of rural poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa is a major challenge for meeting the Sustainable Development Goal on poverty eradication. Using detailed data for Malawi, we investigate the association between seasonality in labor calendars and poverty. We find that (1) seasonality in rural labor calendars runs deep, accounting for 2/3 of total rural […]
Virtual Event: How do Informal Farmland Rental Markets Affect Smallholders’ Well-being?
Abstract: The growth of rural land rental markets is often taken as a virtuous component of an African structural transformation process, by facilitating access to land by efficient but land-constrained farmers. Recent empirical work has generally supported this view. However, one of the shortcomings is that nearly all studies severely underreport activities of landlords, as […]
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