1,720,962 research outputs found
Moral hazard: experimental evidence from tenancy contracts
Get PDFAgricultural productivity is particularly low in developing countries. Output sharing rules that make farmers less-than-full residual claimants are seen as a potentially important driver of low agricultural productivity. We report results from a field experiment designed to estimate and understand the effects of sharecropping contracts on agricultural input choices, risk-taking, and output. The experiment induced variation in the terms of sharecropping contracts. After agreeing to pay 50% of their output to the landlord, tenants were randomized into three groups: (i) some kept 50% of their output; (ii) others kept 75%; (iii) others kept 50% of output and received a lump sum payment at the end of their contract, either fixed or stochastic. We find that tenants with higher output shares utilized more inputs, cultivated riskier crops, and produced 60% more output relative to control. Income or risk exposure have at most a small effect on farm output; the increase in output should be interpreted as an incentive effect of the output sharing rule
Worms, Farms and Schools : Three Essays on Investment Choices in Uganda
No full textQuantifying Externalities in Technology Adoption: Experimental Evidence from Ugandan Farmers I investigate how positive externalities contribute to underadoption of agricultural technology among sub-Saharan African farmers. I focus on the adoption of pest-control technologies. A farmer can benefit in two ways if another adopts: i) she can learn about the technology, a knowledge externality and ii) she can face a lower infection probability, a contagion externality. My approach develops in four steps. First, I measure the value farmers attach to adopting pest-control technologies, and establish that pest-control technologies are desired. Second, I measure the value a farmer attaches to another farmer adopting pest control technologies, and document that farmers anticipate positive spillovers. Third, I show that farmers are responsive to changes in positive externalities. I generate random variation in a farmer's beliefs over knowledge and contagion externalities and find changes in beliefs affect the value she assigns to others' adoption. Finally, I estimate that the private benefit of technology adoption is lower than the cost of the technology, but the social benefit is larger than the cost. My results support the view that local economies may be caught in a low-adoption equilibrium which hinders agricultural productivity growth. A Multifaceted Education Program for the Poor and Talented I study the impacts of the MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program - a support program for pupils entering secondary school in Uganda. The program provides school fees, placement into a top-100 secondary education institution in the country, school inputs, a teacher mentor and a stipend. The program targets high-achieving students from a disadvantaged economic background. Exploiting the randomized assignment of eligible students to the program, I document program impacts on both individual recipients and their households. I find that the program has large positive effects on enrollment and the test scores of recipients. The program is also beneficial to a recipient’s household as consumption, assets, psychological wellbeing and nutrition increase; the impact on siblings is ambiguous. Overall, the two-year impacts of the program are in line with anti-poverty interventions that provide a similar monetary value to recipients. Moral Hazard: Experimental Evidence from Tenancy Contracts Agricultural productivity is particularly low in developing countries. Output sharing rules that make farmers less-than-full residual claimants are seen as a potentially important driver of low agricultural productivity. We report results from a field experiment designed to estimate and understand the effects of sharecropping contracts on agricultural input choices, risk-taking, and output. The experiment induced variation in the terms of sharecropping contracts. After agreeing to pay 50% of their output to the landlord, tenants were randomized into three groups: (i) some kept 50\% of their output; (ii) others kept 75%; (iii) others kept 50% of output and received a lump sum payment at the end of their contract, either fixed or stochastic. We find that tenants with higher output shares utilized more inputs, cultivated riskier crops, and produced 60% more output relative to control. Income or risk exposure have at most a small effect on farm output; the increase in output should be interpreted as an incentive effect of the output sharing rule
Experimental Evidence from Ugandan Farmers
No full textUnderstanding the value of the
externalities associated with a technology is crucial to
correctly estimate the welfare benefits of public policies
and investments. Suboptimal adoption rates of agricultural
technologies in low-income countries partly result from
farmers not fully internalizing the positive externalities
of adoption. This paper designs an experiment to measure the
monetary value of the externalities of an agricultural
pest-control technology; it elicits a farmer’s
willingness-to-pay for another farmer to adopt the
technology, as a measure of the externalities generated by
the other farmer. The findings show that externalities are
large, as mean willingness-to-pay for others is equal to two
days’ wage, or half the willingness-to-pay for themselves.
Willingness-to-pay for another farmer depends on social
proximity (as it is easier to learn about the technology
from closer connections), and the distance between their two
plots (as pest-control is more beneficial for plot
neighbors). Targeting the technology to farmers with
geographically central plots and more socially connected
farmers generates greater positive externalities and more
social value than targeting farmers with the highest
willingness-to-pay for themselves
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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