启研学社由知名学者担任学术顾问，高校师生与企研数据科学团队联合组建，以大数据资源及相关技术助力中国学术与智库研究为宗旨的研究组织。团队当前的主要目标是挖掘经济社会大数据资源在学术和智库领域的应用价值，开展学术大数据治理研究，以及探索大数据分析技术融入中国经济社会研究的可行进路。
《Journal of Development Economics》2020年出版的6期（Volumes 142-147）共计137篇论文中，“三农”主题的有18篇，其中关于中国的论文有3篇，占比16.7%（全部主题中关于中国的论文有25篇，占比18.2%）。
Land and labor allocation under communal tenure: Theory and evidence from China
Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA
This paper studies rural communities' land and labor choices under communal tenure. I develop a theoretical framework to explain why rural communities often adopt practices of labor-contingent land access and frequent land reallocations under communal tenure, and argue that, although these practices reduce cross-household income inequality and improve agricultural production efficiency under imperfect markets, they can nonetheless inefficiently trap labor in agriculture. I rely on a legal reform in 2003 that stopped land reallocations in all Chinese villages and exploit the variation in villages’ reallocation practices before the reform to test the model predictions. The results suggest that the elimination of land reallocations increased off-farm labor and household per capita net income by 7% and 6.5% respectively. However, this came at the cost of a 6% reduction in total agricultural output and a significant jump in intra-village income inequality.Institutions; Communal tenure; Land reallocations; Agriculture
Tractor vs. animal: Rural reforms and technology adoption in ChinaSchool of Economics, Fudan University, China
Better institutions do not always advance technologies. China’s rural reforms during the early 1980s secured land tenure for peasants and dismantled large collective farms into small household farms, which transformed tillage technology. Using a novel data set of 1755 counties from 1976 to 1988, our event study exploits the county-by-county rollout of the reform. We find that the use of tractors plummeted after the reform, while the use of draft animals surged. Post-reform tractor use was more suitable to local factor endowments and farm size. Small tractors became more popular while the number of large tractors declined.Agriculture; Land reform; China; Technology; Property rights; Farm size
Land reform and human capital development: Evidence from PeruMichaelAlbertus¹, MauricioEspinoza², RicardoFort²¹ University of Chicago, USA² Grupo de Análisis para el Desarrollo, Peru
The early establishment and persistence of landholding inequality is linked to poor long-run development outcomes. One crucial channel runs through human capital: large landowners historically underinvested in public goods such as schools, restricted workers and their children from to attending school, and extracted surplus from laborers that could have been invested in human capital. By equalizing landholdings, land redistribution should facilitate human capital accumulation. Using original data on land reform across Peru in the 1970s paired with household surveys, we conduct an age cohort analysis and find instead that higher exposure to land reform negatively impacted educational attainment as measured by the number of years of school attended. The driving mechanisms appear to be economic opportunity as well as income and child labor: individuals exposed to land reform are more likely to remain in rural areas and to have their children contribute labor to agriculture, driving down income in the long term.Land reform; Agriculture; Educational attainment; Child labor; Rural economies
Labor market impacts and responses: The economic consequences of a marine environmental disasterTrung XuanHoang¹, Duong TrungLe², Ha MinhNguyen², Nguyen Dinh TuanVuong³¹ Institute of Theoretical and Applied Research, Duy Tan University, Hanoi, 100000, Vietnam³ University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
This paper examines the aggregate and distributional labor-market impacts of a large-scale marine environmental crisis caused by an industrial pollution in Vietnam. Combining labor force surveys with a novel satellite data on fishing-boat detection, the analysis finds negative and heterogeneous impacts on fishery incomes and employment, and uncovers interesting coping patterns. Satellite data suggest that the affected upstream fishers traveled north to unaffected area to continue fishing. These individuals thus bore a lower income damage. The affected downstream fishers, instead, were more likely to reduce fishing hours and work secondary jobs. The paper also finds evidence on a gradual decline in the damages on fishing intensity and fishery incomes, and a positive labor-market spillover to freshwater fishery.Environmental disaster; Coping mechanisms; Satellite detection; Fisheries
Demand heterogeneity for index-based insurance: The case for flexible productsFranciscoCeballos¹, MiguelRobles²¹ International Food Policy Research Institute. 1201 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC, 20005, USA² Universidad del Pacífico, Lima, Peru
A substantial literature has analyzed the challenges around weather index insurance, yet an important design issue has been generally overlooked. Most index insurance products have so far been characterized by a one-size-fits-all payout structure, intended for a representative farmer, at the cost of ignoring considerable heterogeneity in risk profiles. This paper provides unique evidence on the ways in which heterogeneity in farmers’ risk exposure affects their demand for insurance. We analyze a set of flexible insurance products against excess rainfall and exploit the substantial variation in insurance portfolios demanded by farmers. We explore the relevance of alternative sources of heterogeneity by extending a simple expected utility decision model and relying on structural estimation to test their significance. We find important aspects of farmer heterogeneity directly affecting their demand for insurance. We quantify the benefits of a flexible scheme by comparing farmer welfare to that achieved under alternative counterfactual insurance options.Weather index insurance; Flexible insurance; Multiple discreteness; Farmer heterogeneity; Structural estimation; Uruguay
Grain exports and the causes of China's Great Famine, 1959–1961: County-level evidence粮食出口与中国大饥荒的原因，1959-1961:县级数据的证据HiroyukiKasahara¹, BingjingLi²¹ Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia, Canada² Department of Economics, National University of Singapore, Singapore
This study quantitatively evaluates the relative importance of different causes of China's Great Famine, especially for the importance of grain exports. We exploit county-level over-time variations in crop specialization patterns to construct Bartik-style measures of export shocks. Using county-level panel data from 1955 to 1963, we regress death rates on the Bartik export measures with county and province-year fixed effects as well as time-varying effects of county-level observables. We use weather shocks to instrument for output and consumption. The regression results suggest that increases in grain exports substantially increase death rates. This effect is larger in counties that are further from railways and with fewer local Chinese Communist Party members. To examine the relative importance of different mechanisms, we also estimate the effects of the procurement policy, the determinants of grain output, and the relationship between death rates and county-level average caloric consumption during the famine period. The counterfactual experiments indicate that the fall in agriculture production, the increase in procurement partly driven by grain exports, and the increasingly progressive and inflexible procurement policy collectively increased the number of excess deaths, where no single factor dominates. In particular, grain exports explain 15 percent of excess deaths, which is one-fourth of the effect of the increase in procurement rates between 1957 and 1959.
Famine severity; Over-export; County-level data; Bartik-style export shocks; Grain procurement; Distance to railways; Chinese Communist Party members
Crop choice, trade costs, and agricultural productivityCalifornia State University Fullerton, Fullerton, CA 92834-6848, USA
I argue that the agricultural productivity puzzle is in large part a staple productivity puzzle. Using detailed data from Mexican farms, I show that most farmers grow staple crops, despite the fact that labor productivity in cash crops is substantially higher. To explain this pattern I develop a quantitative general equilibrium framework with multiple regions and crop types, subsistence requirements of staple food, and interregional trade costs. In equilibrium, most farming production is in staple crops because subsistence constraints and high trade costs prevent most farmers from specializing in cash crops. Reducing trade costs in Mexico to the U.S. level would raise the ratio of employment in cash crops to staples by 15 percent and generate a 13 percent increase in agricultural labor productivity.Agriculture; Productivity; Crop choice; Trade costs
Land division: A lab-in-the-field bargaining experiment土地的分割:一个田野实验室（lab-in-the-field）的讨价还价实验MargaritaGáfaro¹, CésarMantilla²¹ Banco de la República de Colombia, Carrera 19 #34-93, Bucaramanga, Colombia² Economics Department, Universidad del Rosario, Calle 12C #4-69, Bogotá, ColombiaWe design a framed bargaining experiment to explore how farmers allocate inherited land. In the experiment, two players with heterogeneous productivity inherit a land plot yielding a risky production, and some tokens to bargain over a land allocation. We conduct this experiment in Colombia with 256 participants from rural municipalities and 120 undergraduate students. Although the efficient, the non-cooperative, and the cooperative solutions of this game predict that the most productive player accrues most of the land, we find that 75% of the bargaining interactions yield egalitarian but inefficient land divisions. We implemented a treatment variation in which a costly disagreement is the only outcome leading to land equality. The single disagreement observed in this treatment weakens the support for preferences for egalitarian outcomes as the driver of inefficient allocations. We discuss alternative explanations based on the salience of equality heuristics, over-valuation of land, and sequential cooperative bargaining.
Land division; Non-cooperative bargaining; Cooperative bargaining; Efficiency
Land use restrictions, misallocation in agriculture, and aggregate productivity in VietnamLouisiana State University, USA
This paper evaluates the effects of restricted land use rights on aggregate productivity using micro-level data within a quantitative model. In particular, I exploit the Rice Land Designation Policy in Vietnam, which forces farmers to produce rice on almost 45% of land plots. I use digitized versions of Vietnam's Local Land Use Atlas and Global Agro-Ecological Zones database to construct a micro-spatial dataset that shapes the model features and allows me to compare the restricted against a counterfactual efficient allocation. The main findings suggest that eliminating all land use restrictions leads to an 8.03% increase in real GDP per capita. While misallocation in agriculture has been studied extensively, the paper highlights a novel source of misallocation also prevalent in other countries such as China, Myanmar, and Uzbekistan.Agriculture; Misallocation; Land use restrictions; Aggregate productivity; Vietnam
Experimental identification of asymmetric information: Evidence on crop insurance in the PhilippinesSnaebjorn Gunnsteinsson
University of Maryland, College Park, United States
I study asymmetric information in crop insurance in the Philippines using a two-level randomized field experiment and incentivized preference elicitation. In this first experimental study of moral hazard in non-health insurance, preventable damages double on randomly insured plots among farmers with high trust in the insurance provider. Farmers prefer insurance on plots that are at risk of floods and crop diseases, a sign of classic adverse selection, and plots that are far away from home, a sign of selection on anticipated moral hazard behavior, resulting in 72% higher payouts on preferred plots. Overcoming these challenges requires leveraging new technologies.Insurance; Adverse selection; Moral hazard; Selection on moral hazard; Information asymmetries; Selective trials; Crop insurance; Experiment; Philippines; Agriculture
Land titles and violent conflict in rural MexicoPaulCastañeda Dower¹, TobiasPfutze²¹ University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States² Florida International University, United States
Better enforcement of property rights reduces the incentives to engage in violent competition over resources. At the same time, greater tenure security may disrupt a key mechanism for political and social control, the discretionary allocation of land by local authorities, also potentially affecting the level of violence. We investigate the effect of a land certification program, which produced exogenous variation in tenure security, on violent deaths in Mexico's rural municipalities from 1993 to 2007. We find that land titles significantly decrease violent deaths on average. However, this reduction is present only in municipalities where the dominant political party has never lost an election. If all ejidos had been certified instantaneously in 1993, our estimates give a 12.8% reduction in homicides, pointing to a large social cost of having land as a political tool.Property rights; Violence; Land reform; Mexico; Ejido
Trade and agricultural technology adoption: Evidence from AfricaDepartment of Economics, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, 05753, USA
The incentives for and effects of widespread technology adoption depend on the trade costs separating producers from input and output markets. I incorporate the decision to adopt imported fertilizer into a model of agricultural trade between 230 regional markets across sub-Saharan Africa. I then evaluate two alternative approaches to promoting technology adoption: lowering trade costs and subsidizing fertilizer. Whereas trade cost reduction shifts production towards the most productive regions, subsidies lead to larger increases in fertilizer use. Greater adoption lowers local food prices under existing high trade costs but only increases farmer incomes when trade costs are low.Technology adoption; Trade costs; Input subsidies; Fertilizer; Africa
Can referral improve targeting? Evidence from an agricultural training experimentMarcelFafchamps¹, AsadIslam², Mohammad AbdulMalek³, DebayanPakrashi⁴¹ Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA² Monash University, Australia³ University of Tsukuba, Japan⁴ Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India
We seek to better target agricultural training by inviting current trainees to refer future trainees. Some referees are rewarded or incentivized. Training increases the adoption of recommended practices and improves performance, but not all trainees adopt. Referred trainees are 4.2% more likely to adopt than randomly selected trainees, and 3.4-3.8% more likely than what can be predicted from observed characteristics of trainees. This implies that referral provides a slight improvement in targeting. Rewarding or incentivizing referees does not improve referral quality, however. When referees receive financial compensation, referees and referred farmers are more likely to coordinate their adoption behavior. Incentivized referees are more likely to adopt, to incur losses from adoption, and to abandon the new practices in the following year.
Short- and long-run impacts of rural electrification: Evidence from the historical rollout of the U.S. power grid农村电气化的短期和长期影响:来自美国电网推广的历史证据JoshuaLewis¹,EdsonSevernini²¹ Université de Montréal, 3150, Rue Jean-Brillant, Montréal, QC, H3T 1N8, USA² Carnegie Mellon University, 4800 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA
Electrification among American farm households increased from less than 10 percent to nearly 100 percent over a three decade span, 1930–1960. We exploit the historical rollout of the U.S. power grid to study the short- and long-run impacts of rural electrification on local economies. In the short-run, rural electrification led to increases in agricultural employment, rural farm population, and rural property values, but there was little impact on the local non-agriculture economy. Benefits exceeded historical costs, even in rural areas with low population density. As for the long run, rural counties that gained early access to electricity experienced increased economic growth that persisted for decades after the country was fully electrified. In remote rural areas, local development was driven by an expansion in the agricultural sector. Meanwhile in rural counties near metropolitan areas, long-run population growth coincided with increases in housing costs and decreases in agricultural employment, suggesting that rural electrification stimulated suburban expansion.
Rural transformation, inequality, and the origins of microfinanceMarvinSuesse¹, NikolausWolf²¹ Trinity College Dublin, Ireland² Humboldt University of Berlin and CEPR, Germany
What determines the development of rural financial markets? Starting from a simple theoretical framework, we derive the factors shaping the market entry of rural microfinance institutions across time and space. We provide empirical evidence for these determinants using the expansion of credit cooperatives in the 236 eastern counties of Prussia between 1852 and 1913. This setting is attractive as it provides a free market benchmark scenario without public ownership, subsidization, or direct regulatory intervention. Furthermore, we exploit features of our historical set-up to identify causal effects. The results show that declining agricultural staple prices, as a feature of structural transformation, leads to the emergence of credit cooperatives. Similarly, declining bank lending rates contribute to their rise. Low asset sizes and land inequality inhibit the regional spread of cooperatives, while ethnic heterogeneity has ambiguous effects. We also offer empirical evidence suggesting that credit cooperatives accelerated rural transformation by diversifying farm outputs.
Microfinance; Credit cooperatives; Rural transformation; Land inequality; Prussia
Aiming high and falling low: The SADA-Northern Ghana Millennium Village ProjectEdoardoMasset¹, JorgeGarcía-Hombradosb² ⁴, ArnabAcharya³¹ CEDIL at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, LIDC, 20 Bloomsbury Square, London, WC1A 2NS, UK² Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Department of Economic Theory and Economic History, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Calle Francisco Tomás y Valiente, 5, Cantoblanco. Madrid, PC:28049 Spain³ Honorary Senior Lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK⁴ Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, GermanyThis article assesses the impact of the Northern Ghana Millennium Village Project. We estimate project effects on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) indicators using a difference-in-difference approach applied to matched villages and households using a sub-classification of the propensity score. The project improved some MDG indicators but, with few exceptions, impacts were small and core welfare indicators, such as monetary poverty, undernutrition and child mortality, remained unaffected. We found no spillover effects of the project to neighbouring areas and no displacements of development expenditure by local government and NGOs. We assessed the cost-effectiveness of the intervention and concluded that MVP did not produce the expected cost-saving synergies. We attribute the lack of impact to poor project design, redundancy of the interventions, and excessively high expectations.
Millennium villages project; Integrated rural development; Millennium development goals
Fertility and rural electrification in BangladeshTomokiFujii¹, Abu S.Shonchoy²¹ School of Economics, Singapore Management University, 90 Stamford Road, 178903, Singapore² Department of Economics, Florida International University, 11200 SW 8th Street, Miami, FL, 33199, USA
We use contemporaneous and retrospective panel datasets to examine the household-level relationship between fertility and access to electricity in Bangladesh. We find that access to electricity reduces fertility by about 0.2 children over a period of five years or total fertility rate by about 1.2 in most estimates. This finding is robust with respect to the choice of the estimation method, the choice of sample, and potential presence of endogeneity. The finding also corroborates the theoretical predictions on time use and consumption pattern derived from our model of electrification and fertility. The results also suggest that television is an important impact channel. The study findings underscore the importance of examining a broad and long-term impact of rural electrification and possibly other infrastructure interventions.
Bangladesh; Infrastructure; Television; Difference-in-differences; Retrospective panel data
Land quality, land rights, and indigenous povertyBryanLeonard¹, Dominic P.Parker², Terry L.Anderson³¹ Arizona State University² University of Wisconsin³ Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Agricultural land endowments should contribute positively to economic growth, but in countries colonized by European powers this has not always happened. Productive land attracted colonization, which disrupted Indigenous institutions in ways that can stunt development. American Indian reservations provide a powerful example. Where land quality was high, the federal government facilitated land titling and non-Indian settlement through the General Allotment Act of 1887. The evidence suggests this process caused a U-shaped relationship between American Indian per capita income over 1970 to 2010 and a reservation’s share of prime agricultural land, in contrast to a positive relationship across U.S. counties. The downward slope of the U is due to land ownership fractionation that disproportionately affected reservations with mid-quality land and now requires federal administration. After controlling for fractionation, the effect of prime land is positive, implying land quality has indirectly suppressed income growth through its effects on land rights.______________________________________
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