Laura A. Paul

Category: Agriculture

  • Heterogeneous and Conditional Returns from DT Maize for Farmers in Southern Africa

    Heterogeneous and Conditional Returns from DT Maize for Farmers in Southern Africa

    Laura Paul

    European Review of Agricultural Economics 2021 (link)

    Abstract: This paper assesses the return to DT maize using four years of data from on-farm yield trials and high-resolution precipitation data (10-day measurements at a 0.05° resolution) in southern Africa to assess claims of the DT maize advantage. On farms (rather than controlled trials) DT maize yield slightly exceeds that of other varieties: 7% higher yields on average, and 15% higher yields under moderate drought stress with additional heterogeneity in returns across high and low performing farms. For low-performing farms, a net loss of $10/ha of DT maize increases to a net gain of $30/ha in a drought year.

    Recording from Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk and Resilience Event in Washington, DC on October 31, 2019:

  • Bundling Stress Tolerant Seeds and Insurance for More Resilient and Productive Small-scale Agriculture

    Bundling Stress Tolerant Seeds and Insurance for More Resilient and Productive Small-scale Agriculture

    NBER Working Paper No. 29234 (link)

    Steve Boucher, Michael Carter, Jon Einar Flatnes, Travis Lybbert, Jonathan Malacarne, Paswel Marenya, and Laura Paul

    Risk often inhibits on-farm investment by smallholder farmers. Recent evidence indicates that index insurance and stress tolerant seeds can separately and partially offset this risk effect. In this study, we explore whether the complementarities between these two risk management technologies can be harnessed to underwrite a resilient, high productivity small farm sector. Utilizing a multi-year randomized control trial that spanned two countries and exploits natural variation in weather shocks, we find that drought tolerant maize seeds mitigate the impact of mid-season drought. Compared to farms in control villages, where shocks have persistent effects that reduce future investment and productivity, those with access to both drought tolerant seeds and multi-peril index insurance show greater resilience and immediately bounce back from shocks. Experiential learning is key to realizing this resilience effect: Farmers who experienced shocks intensify their subsequent use of the technologies and exhibit what we call resilience-plus, while those who did not experience shocks disadopt. Together these findings showcase important complementarities between these risk mitigating technologies and the crucial role learning plays in tapping their potential stochastic and dynamic benefits to small farmers.

  • Challenges in Recruiting U.S. Farmers for Policy-Relevant Economic Field Experiments

    Challenges in Recruiting U.S. Farmers for Policy-Relevant Economic Field Experiments

    Collin Weigel, Laura Paul, Paul Ferraro, and Kent Messer

    Featured Article in the AEPP. First published: 28 September 2020.

    Available at https://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13066

    Abstract: To develop evidence-based agricultural policies, researchers increasingly use insights from economic field experiments. These insights are often limited by the challenges of recruiting large and representative samples of farmers. To improve the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of farmer recruitment, researchers should apply the same experimental methods to the recruitment process that they apply to their main research questions. Here we experimentally evaluate ten recruiting strategies in two large-scale, high stakes experiments. We find that monetary incentives and reminders are effective, but costly. Costless strategies, such as prominently citing a well-known institution as the sponsor, had positive but small, effects on recruitment.