This paper assesses rural households’ decision to use improved maize varieties in Malawi and examines its impact on household welfare using a three-year household panel data.
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in the social sciences are typically not double-blind, so participants know they are “treated” and will adjust their behavior accordingly. Such effort responses complicate the assessment of impact.
This paper investigates impact heterogeneity in the adoption of improved maize varieties using data from rural Tanzania. We used a generalized propensity-score matching methodology, complemented with a parametric econometric method to check the robustness of results.
This paper studies how different NOx abatement technologies have diffused under the Swedish system of refunded emissions charges and analyzes the determinants of the time to adoption. The policy, under which the charge revenues are refunded back to the regulated firms in proportion to energy output, was explicitly designed to affect investment in NOx reducing technologies.
This study investigates the impact of package adoption of inorganic fertilizers and improved maize seed varieties on yield among smallholder households in Kenya. We used a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences approach combined with propensity score matching to control for both time-invariant and unobservable household heterogeneity.
Economic Modeling of Welfare Gains From Resource Recovery From Fecal Waste [with Jhih-Shyang Shih (Resources for the Future)]: Waterborne diseases from poor sanitation affect millions worldwide. In
This is a PhD dissertation by Haileselassie Medhin and containing seven self-contained papers:
The adoption and diffusion of sustainable agricultural practices (SAPs) has become an important issue in the development-policy agenda for sub-Saharan Africa, especially as a way to tackle land degradation, low agricultural productivity and poverty. However, the adoption rates of SAPs remain below expected levels.
We use economic analysis to evaluate grandfathering, auctioning, and benchmarking approaches for allocation of emissions allowances and then discuss practical experience from European and American schemes.
In this paper we use laboratory experiments to test the theoretical predictions derived by Villegas-Palacio and Coria (2010) about the effects of the interaction between technology adoption and incomplete enforcement. They show that under Tradable Emissions Permits (TEPs), and in contrast to taxes, the fall in permit price produced by adoption of environmentally friendly technologies reduces the benefits of violating the environmental regulation at the margin and leads firms to improve their compliance behavior.