Sanford Institute Working Papers
Abstract:
This paper tests whether agricultural extension and imperfect
supervision -- conflated here into the number of visits by a
technical assistant -- increase productivity at the margin in a
sample of contract farming arrangements between a processing firm
and small agricultural producers in Madagascar. \noindent Production
functions are estimated that treat the number of visits by a
technical assistant as an input and that exploit the variation in
the number of visits between the contracted crops grown on a given
plot by a specific grower, thereby accounting for district-,
grower-, and plot-level unobserved heterogeneity. Empirical results
indicate that the elasticity of yield with respect to the number of
visits lies between 1.3 and 1.7, depending on whether one considers
the number of visits by a technical assistant with or without its
interaction with the grower's education, included here to crudely
tease out the effects of agricultural extension and imperfect
supervision.

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