Location: 368A Heady Hall

Description: Sam Bird (U.C. Davis)
“Technology Adoption, Market Participation, and Smallholder Endowments in Western Kenya”

Abstract: Many governments in sub-Saharan Africa subsidize technology adoption by agricultural households to support food production and food security. Most subsidies target land rich households, but some of these households may not adopt due to fixed costs of selling output while some non-targeted households would adopt to avoid costs of buying food from the market. In this paper I study how household endowments and market conditions shape technology adoption and market participation for staple crops. I develop an agricultural household model and find transaction costs in staple markets change both the rate of adoption across the land endowment distribution and the subsidy needed to induce technology adoption when households are
initially pessimistic about physical returns to the technology. I then estimate rates of technology adoption across market participation regimes using data from a randomized control trial of high-yielding maize varieties developed for western Kenya. I predict expected market participation from household endowments and then estimate how technology adoption varies with expected market participation. The effect of randomized access to hybrid seeds on adoption does not differ between groups defined by expected market participation. The theoretical and empirical analyses show that transaction costs in output markets change household technology adoption and imply that policymakers should factor these costs into the design and targeting of agricultural technology adoption programs.

Bird is finishing up his Ph.D. at U.C. Davis in the department of Ag and Resource Economics under Michael Carter (with an expected completion date of June 2019). He graduated from Iowa State University in 2012 with a B.S. in economics and global resource systems and will be speaking about his research in Western Kenya.