Publications

Working papers 

Abstract: Understanding how farmers adopt complex agricultural technologies is critical for improving productivity, sustainability, and resilience in developing countries. We study the adoption of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) among groundnut farmers in rural Bangladesh using a cluster-randomized trial. The intervention delivered a package of IPM recommendations through a training program and in-season extension support. Moving beyond binary measures, we examine three dimensions of behavior: the share of cultivated land under IPM, the subset of recommended components adopted, and the quantities of inputs used. Adoption is often partial, with several farmers implementing certain components, especially early-season inputs, on only part of their land. Partial adopters tend to have slightly lower incomes and cultivate more leased in land. While IPM adoption is associated with modest, inconsistent yield gains and largely unchanged profits, chemical pesticide uses declines substantially, particularly among high adopters who use IPM inputs in all their cultivated land. These results highlight the importance of accounting for partial and sequential adoption in evaluating multi-component technologies and designing extension strategies to address labor, timing, and input access constraints.


2. Does Training Farmers on Multiple Technologies Deter Adoption? Evidence from a Farm Management Training Program in Bangladesh (with Anubhab Gupta, Binoy Majumder, Mahamitra Das and Rangaswamy Muniappan) 

Abstract: To boost agricultural production, recent studies of technology adoption consistently suggest the adoption of integrated farm management systems. However, a limitation of these studies is the absence of a rigorous analysis of the profitability of new technologies, which are a package of several practices. Our paper fills this gap by studying the economic impacts of a training program that provided a comprehensive set of recommendations, including information on Integrated Pest Management (IPM), Good Agricultural Practices (GAP), and agronomic suggestions, to groundnut farmers in rural Bangladesh. Using reduced-form econometric analyses, we assess the impact of the training program on input usage and costs, utilization of recommendations, yield, and profit. Our findings suggest that if farmers receive information and training on several low- and high-cost technologies together, they are more likely to adopt only the low-cost ones, which makes the training program undesirable for the adoption of high-cost technologies.