Below you find an overview of ongoing projects
In value chains where quality of the underlying commodity is hard to observe and track, quality upgrading my be challenging. We test two barriers to the development of a market for quality in Ugandan dairy value chains using a field experiment with treatments at different levels. At the farmer level, we conjecture that farmers are paying attention to the wrong quality attributes and design a light touch information treatment to point out the quality parameters that are most relevant downstream at the processor level. Midstream, at milk collection centers where milk is bulked and chilled, we provide a socio-technological innovation bundle that consists of a technology aimed at facilitating quality discovery and digital record keeping infrastructure. We look at impact of both interventions at farmer and milk collection center level and consider outcomes such as milk quality, prices received and quantities transacted.
This is joint work with Richard Ariong, Sarah Wairimu Kariuki and Jordan Chamberlin.
This work has been pre-registered at the AEA-RCT registry (AEARCTR-0010262).
Progress can be followed on GitHub.
In many developing country contexts, semi-subsistence farmers act as both producers and consumers of staple crops, implying that decisions to take up new agricultural technologies depend not only on agronomic performance but also on consumption qualities. This study investigates how emphasizing these different traits affects farmers’ willingness to try and continue using an improved maize variety. In eastern Uganda, we implemented a randomized controlled trial with two intervention arms. One promoted production traits—such as high yield, drought tolerance, and pest resistance—by distributing free seed sample packs. The other emphasized consumption traits—such as taste and ease of preparation—through cooking demonstrations and blind taste tests. Both interventions improved farmers’ perceptions of the new seed, but only the consumption-focused approach led to a sustained increase in its use. In contrast, farmers who received free seed samples tended to recycle harvested grain as seed, reducing demand for newly purchased seed in subsequent seasons. We interpret this behavior as a rational response to limited trust in input markets and uncertain output prices, with important implications for the design of seed promotion strategies.
This is joint work with Berber Kramer, Carly Trachtman, and Gashaw T. Abate.
This work has been pre-registered at the AEA-RCT registry (AEARCTR-0010666).
Progress can be followed on GitHub.
Temporary price reductions are a widely used strategy to encourage the initial uptake of new products or technologies, offering users the opportunity to gain firsthand experience and potentially facilitate diffusion through social networks. However, concerns remain that subsidizing or giving away products may reduce their perceived value, increasing the risk that recipients will underutilize, repurpose, or resell the product rather than use it as intended. We examine three behavioral and economic mechanisms through which charging a price may increase uptake, intended use and subsequent adoption of a new technologies: (1) a screening effect, whereby payment deters users who do not value the product and targets those more likely to use it; (2) a sunk cost effect, where paying a positive price induces psychological commitment to use; and (3) a quality signaling effect, where a positive price conveys higher product quality. We test the relevance of these mechanisms in the context of newly released seed varieties for staple food crops, drawing on field experiments with smallholder farmers in Uganda and Ethiopia. Our design allows us to isolate each mechanism’s contribution to adoption and use. The findings offer insights into optimal pricing strategies for promoting the uptake of beneficial technologies in low-income settings.
This is joint work with Berber Kramer, Liesbeth Colen, and Gashaw T. Abate.
This work has been pre-registered at the AEA-RCT registry (AEARCTR-0010666).
Progress can be followed on GitHub and a working paper is available here.
Organizations that procure food for subsequent distribution as aid are increasingly recognizing its potential to stimulate local market development by facilitating small-scale traders’ and farmer organizations’ access to reliable and profitable markets. Building on this commitment, they are instituting strategies aimed at engaging private sector actors, particularly large-scale traders, to enable more cost-effective sourcing while advancing broader development goals such as improved nutrition, resilience, smallholder incomes, livelihoods, and gender equality. This research analyzes systematically collected stack survey data from farmers and traders in western Uganda to evaluate the extent to which conditional contracts have contributed to these objectives and fostered transformation within local agricultural value chains.
This is joint work with Gashaw T. Abate and Kalyani Raghunathan.
Raising agricultural productivity among smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa is widely recognized as an important component of inclusive wealth creation and structural transformation. Central to this endeavor will be the adoption of sustainable soil and land management to improve the sustainability, resilience and productivity of agriculture. As such, government advise farmers to increase soil productivity by embracing the use of fertilizers and implement proper soil health management practices. However, these recommendations mostly come in the form of blanket one-size-fits-all recommendations that ignore heterogeneity in soil characteristics that individual farmers face. Using a cluster randomize control trial, we evaluate the impact of a bundled intervention that involves offering farmers a soil test on a plot they select and, using the results of this soil test, provide them with tailored fertilizer recommendation and access to agricultural advice on the proper application of the recommended fertilizer to attain a desired yield for a particular crop the farmer chooses to plant on the plot. Furthermore, we also explore resources constraints as a potential barrier to the adoption of site specific fertilizer blends by providing a subsidy tied to the recommended fertilizer blend.
This is joint work with Richard Ariong, Thomas Assefa, Jonathan Atkinson, Joachim De Weerdt, Edwin Siyame, David J. Spielman, Patson Nalivata, and Mozes Munthali.
This work has been pre-registered at the AEA-RCT registry (AEARCTR-0014293).
Progress can be followed on GitHub.
It is often observed that smallholder farmers sell most of their marketable surplus immediately after the harvest when seasonal price movements reach their lowest point, instead of waiting just a few more months until prices recover. Most explanations for this seemingly sub-optimal behavior focus on economic or infrastructural issues, such as credit constraints or lack of storage facilities. In this study, we take a closer look at two potential behavioral explanations. One explanation focuses on household expenditure and assumes that households face challenges in accurately predicting future expenditures, systematically underestimating future needs. A second potential explanation focuses on household income, where motivated reasoning leads farmers to sell too early and/or at low prices. To test these hypotheses, we conduct two planning-based interventions among a sample of Malawian smallholder farmers: (1) a detailed expense budget and (2) a sales plan with explicit commitment to timing of sales, quantities and prices.
This is joint work with Joachim De Weerdt and Brian Dillon.
This work has been pre-registered at the AEA-RCT registry (AEARCTR-0009410).