The expansion of trade in pre-industrial Europe led to a transformation of agriculture. It induced specialization to exploit comparative advantage as well as a restructuring of the process of production, with manorial agriculture giving way to an agriculture of family farms. Technological progress was not itself a driving force, but rather a consequence of this transformation. Merchants and urb...

In repeated games with di®erential information on one side, the labelling \general case" refers to games in which the action of the informed player is not known to the uninformed, who can only observe a signal which is the random outcome of his and his opponent's action. Here we consider the problem of minimizing regret (in the sense ̄rst formulated by Hannan [8]) when the information available...

We introduced a new seed variety to a subset of farmers across 100 rural Indian villages. Half of the villages were randomly allocated to receive an information treatment known as the farmer field day. The new seed variety was explained, selected adopters shared their experiences, and villagers were taken to the field to observe the crop during these events. We find that farmer field days impro...

This paper develops a theory in which oligarchic ownership of land or other natural resources impedes entrepreneurship in the manufacturing sector and thereby retards structural change and economic development. We show that, due to oligopsony power of owners in the agricultural labor market, higher ownership concentration is harmful for start-ups by landless, credit-constrained households, whos...

An Empirical Study of the Relationships between CO2 Emissions, Economic Growth and Openness This paper investigates the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and its causal relationships with economic growth and openness by using time series data (1971-2006) from China (an emerging market), Korea (a newly industrialized country), and Japan (a deve...

This paper examines what factor determines demand of firms for contract farming, and how the market condition affects their demand. 208 pork processing firms in Jilin and Henan Provinces in China faced a severe price competition, and failed to differentiate their products that allow them to raise selling prices. Under this market condition, few firms have demands for employing contract farming....

Large and regular seasonal price fluctuations in local grain markets appear to o↵er African farmers substantial inter-temporal arbitrage opportunities, but these opportunities remain largely unexploited: small-scale farmers are commonly observed to “sell low and buy high” rather than the reverse. In a field experiment in Kenya, we show that credit market imperfections limit farmers’ abilities t...

This work studies the last twenty-six years of civil war in Myanmar. Since the country bears several correlates of war such as poor economic performance, rugged terrain, lack of inclusive institutions, ethnic heterogeneity and richness in natural resources, it represents an ideal ground for understanding their interplay in conflict outbreaks. While empirical and theoretical research on civil co...