17 pages, Rural households in developing countries often depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. However, many also pursue off-farm economic activities either to complement their farm income or because they lack access to agricultural land. Rural off-farm employment is often informal and temporary. Searching for jobs can be associated with high transaction costs, which may be a constraint on some households’ participation in off-farm employment. The increasing spread of mobile phones may help to reduce these transaction costs. Here, we test the hypothesis that mobile phone ownership increases rural households’ participation in off-farm employment and—through this mechanism—also improves household income. We use nationally representative panel data from rural India and regression models with household fixed effects to control for confounding factors and unobserved heterogeneity. We find that mobile phone ownership is positively associated with the likelihood of participating in various types of off-farm employment, including casual wage labour, salaried employment and non-agricultural self-employment. This association is larger in female-headed than in male-headed households. The estimates also show that mobile phone ownership is positively associated with household income, partly channeled through the off-farm employment mechanism.
24pgs, Increasingly, the health claims made by food products focus on the marketing of specific molecular enrichments. Research exploring consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for health claims assumes that individuals hold perfect information on the benefits of the enrichment, and that their valuations depend solely on whether or not they need to improve their health. While health interventions are aimed at individuals at higher health risk, consumers may be unaware of the health risks that they face, limiting the effectiveness of a generic targeting strategy. Using an orthogonal experimental design, we explore the impact of two factors on the WTP for vitamin D enrichment in eggs: whether the information is person-specific or generic; and the presence of a health claim explaining the vitamin D enrichment. Results indicate that it is the provision of information, not the health claim, that influences WTP. Both generic and personalised information lead to similar increases in the WTP for vitamin D enrichment. While we only observe a direct effect of generic information on the WTP for vitamin D enrichment, personal information may also operate by increasing the perceived risk of vitamin D deficiency. Our results support the use of personalised health information during the choice task as a means of increasing the sales of healthy products.
15pgs, Research has suggested to not solely include cognitive processes but also affective processes in economic choice modeling. Studying Medjool dates, we conducted a laboratory experiment combining choice experiments and eye-tracking to account for cognitive processes. In addition, participants indicated their level of worry related to production practices to account for affective processes. Our results show that consumers worry more about pesticide residues than genetic modification in foods. They also pay more attention to labels related to these production practices compared to other labels; and the production practice labels received the highest willingness to pay (WTP). Results from linear regressions show that both cognitive and affective processes are associated with WTP. Especially in the full model for WTP for pesticide-free labeling an increase of attention by 1 s increases WTP on average by $0.10 and an increase of the level of worry from one category to the next increases WTP on average by $0.17. Overall, results show that including both cognitive and affective processes as explanatory variables is important when determining factors associated with WTP.
11pgs, Are farmers better stewards of the land they own than the land they rent from others? We answer this question using a data set that identifies Ontario farmers’ conservation practices on their own land as well as the land they rent. Using a fixed-effects regression approach, we find that the role of tenure varies for different types of conservation practices. Farmers were found to be just as likely to adopt a machinery-related practice such as conservation tillage on their rented land as that land which they own. On the other hand, farmers were found to be less likely to adopt site-specific conservation practices such as planting cover crops on rented land. However, this effect diminishes as the expected length of the rental relationship increases when the landlord has a farming background.
20 pgs, Off-farm employment opportunities are thought to have an effect on farm exit rates, though evidence on the sign of this effect has been mixed. Examining this issue in the context of Japanese agriculture, we find that farm exits are related to off-farm income as a share of household income, and more specifically to the nature of off-farm work. Two econometric models are developed: a hierarchical Bayesian linear model and a hierarchical Bayesian Poisson model. Both models perform well in predicting exit rates across the towns and prefectures of Japan.
