This paper presents a scalable digital learning system that can store and provide Web access to digital contents from voluntaries, teachers, and institutions that lack resources or expertise to offer classes over the Internet. We use the server-cluster architecture as a way to create scalable and highly available solutions. However, hosting a variety of contents from different owners on such a ...

This paper presents a synthesis of the main theoretical and empirical contributions that analyse production choices of farm households living and operating in developing countries. The review is particularly concerned with recent micro-economic contributions that highlight the trade-off farm households typically face, between full-income risk and expected return, while making production decisio...

The overall aim of this study is to empirically investigate the cost structure of a management agreement type agri-environmental instrument and to identify factors for cost variation over space and time. We control for the actual level of compliance by using compliance weighted average scheme cost ratios. Beside technological and economic performance measures, we also incorporate risk proxies. ...

Maintaining drinking water quality is essential to water companies and their customers. However, agricultural non-point source pollution of waterways is a major cause of water quality degradation. In this paper we examine the feasibility of using payments financed by a water company to pay farmers to adjust agricultural land management practices to protect water quality. We use the choice exper...

Consensus is growing that agriculture is vulnerable to climate change and adaptation responses are necessary to minimize impacts. Nonetheless, the diversity of potential impacts, agro-ecological contexts and regional capacity for change make understanding adaptation behaviors challenging and ensure that climate change adaptation will not be the same across all contexts. Considering this heterog...

Agricultural beneficial management practices (BMPs) are popular strategies for mitigating non-point sources of pollution. There are economic costs for BMP placement on agricultural lands mainly because it affects profit margins of farm operations. Given the cost implication and biophysical heterogeneity of farm lands, 8 the spatial targeting of BMP placement is consequential to their cost-effec...

This paper relaxes the single factor model of educational mobility and analyzes heterogeneous effects of family background on children’s education in rural China, with a focus on market reform and non-farm occupations. We use data on three generations in rural China spanning preand post-reform periods. Evidence from a battery of econometric approaches shows that the influence of family backgrou...

Hedging is one of the most important risk management decisions that farmers make and has a potentially large role in the level of profit eventually earned from farming. Using panel data from a survey of Georgia farmers that recorded their hedging decisions for 4 years on four crops, we examine the role of habit, demographics, farm characteristics, and information sources on the hedging decision...

Information flows are weaker in a heterogeneous population when the performance of a new technology is sensitive to unobserved individual characteristics, preventing individuals from learning from neighbors’ experiences. This characterization of social learning is tested with wheat and rice data from the Indian Green Revolution. The rice-growing regions display greater heterogeneity in growing ...