Papers by Stein T. Holden
Agroforestry Systems, Mar 1, 1992
Three trials investigating the potential of alley cropping to improve the traditional systems of ... more Three trials investigating the potential of alley cropping to improve the traditional systems of cultivation, chitemene and fundikila, in the Northern Province of Zambia are described. Flemingia congesta, Tephrosia vogelii, and Sesbania sesban, were grown in association with finger millet, groundnut, cowpea, and maize in various traditional cropping sequences. The indigenous species Tephrosia vogelii and Sesbania sesban were not able to withstand repeated pruning and the long following dry season, and were replaced with Calliandra calothyrsus, and Cassia spectabilis. Over a four year period, there was no benefit by alley cropping with any of the tree species on crop yields, and yields in alley crop treatments even dropped significantly below the control treatments in the fourth year, casting doubt on the potential of alley cropping for sustainable production. There was also no consistent effect on soil chemical characteristics in any of the trials. It was suggested that this lack of beneficial response to alley cropping was due to low tree biomass production, low quality of prunings, and an inappropriate cropping sequence. There was no evidence that alley cropping contributed to enhanced nutrient recycling, despite substantial locaiised pools of soil nutrients, particularly in the chitemene, with which recycling could potentially occur.
Social Science Research Network, 2023
Social Science Research Network, 2022
The objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of off-farm employment on village factor mar... more The objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of off-farm employment on village factor market development, and estimate the effects of off-farm employment on input use in farm production, especially inputs related to the change of land production capacity. Four household groups are distinguished and at group level, they show large differences in terms of household size, number of laborers, income levels and income composition, while small differences on land endowments. They also show to some extent the differences in participations of factor markets, output markets and oxen rental markets and credit markets. A Shangzhu Village social accounting matrix (SAM) is built and represents the major transactions among production activities, institutions and the external market environment. Simulations based on SAM multipliers indicate that for most crops, farm production is expanded in particular by the household groups experiencing the largest income gains, and annual crops have the highest increase of production than others (except perennial crop in last scenario). On average, government investment in infrastructure has strong impact on agricultural production, and the impact of local off-farm employment is smaller than that of migration. Government investment scenario gives the best results for stimulating the development of agricultural labor markets (low-and high-educated labor) as well as the land and oxen renting out, however, migration and local non-farm activities affect mostly in land and oxen renting in for household groups, respectively. Because percentage increase of manure application is higher than that of chemical materials, the impact of off-farm employment on land production capacity could be positive.
Resources for the Future eBooks, 2009
European Review of Agricultural Economics, Oct 7, 2016
Climate risk represents an increasing threat to poor and vulnerable farmers in drought-prone area... more Climate risk represents an increasing threat to poor and vulnerable farmers in drought-prone areas of Africa. This study assesses the maize adoption responses of food insecure farmers in Malawi, where drought-tolerant (DT) maize was recently introduced. A field experiment, eliciting relative risk aversion, loss aversion and subjective probability weighting parameters of farmers, is combined with a detailed farm household survey. A state-contingent production model with cumulative prospect theory preferences is estimated. More risk-averse households were more likely to have adopted DT maize, less likely to have adopted other improved maize varieties and less likely to have dis-adopted traditional local maize (LM). Exposure to past drought shocks stimulated adoption of DT maize and dis-adoption of LM.
Land Use Policy, Sep 1, 2016
This study assesses the de jure and de facto land market legal restrictions in the Tigray region ... more This study assesses the de jure and de facto land market legal restrictions in the Tigray region in Ethiopia and the extent of implementation of the new land rental restrictions that were introduced in 2006 that state that not more than 50% of a farm can be rented out. The knowledge, perceptions and attitudes regarding the law among local Land Administration Committee (LAC) members, local conflict mediators and a sample of rural households are investigated. We find that the rented area restriction is commonly violated and not enforced. The law is circumvented by framing sharecropping as something other than land rental, although sharecropping is the dominant land rental contract in the region. When it is made clear that the law may hurt weak and vulnerable (often female-headed) households that are unable to farm their land themselves and therefore rent it out, the large majority of LAC members, conflict mediators and rural households are against the law.
Summary Stein T. Holden and Prem L. Sankhayan, ‘Population Pressure, Agricultural Change and Envi... more Summary Stein T. Holden and Prem L. Sankhayan, ‘Population Pressure, Agricultural Change and Environmental Degradation in the Western Himalayan Region of India’, Forum for Development Studies, 1998:2, pp. 271–300. This article provides a conceptual and methodological basis for studying the population-agriculture-environment nexus in the western Himalayan state of India, namely, Himachal Pradesh. A number of theories used to explain the phenomenon of environment degradation, including the neo-liberal, environmental economics and imperfect information and transaction cost theories, have been discussed. We apply a pressure-state-response framework in our analysis. The general features of the study region, and the institutional structure at community level, the human activities (pressure variables) responsible for deforestation and soil erosion, and the responses which have evolved over time to counter these problems, have been outlined. The study concludes that in spite of a rapidly increasing population, on...
Ecological Economics, Mar 1, 2023
Annual Review of Resource Economics, Oct 5, 2019
Fertilizer and other input subsidies have been prominent components of agricultural policies in m... more Fertilizer and other input subsidies have been prominent components of agricultural policies in many Asian and African countries since the 1960s. Their economic and political rationale is scrutinized with emphasis on the second generation of targeted input subsidy programs that were scaled up in Sub-Saharan Africa after 2005. The extent to which they fulfill the goal of being market smart is assessed after inspecting the potential for such subsidies in Sub-Saharan Africa. The new fertilizer subsidy programs do not live up to the market-smart principles and suffer from severe design and implementation failures. While a clear exit strategy was one of the key principles, this has been neglected, with the result that most current programs are more sticky than smart. They have only partially achieved the intended impacts and have resulted in a number of unintended negative impacts. Subsidy program redesign should start from a pilot stage testing basic mechanisms.
World Development, Nov 1, 2022
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Sep 2, 2021
The risky investment game of Gneezy and Potters (1997) has been a popular tool used to estimate r... more The risky investment game of Gneezy and Potters (1997) has been a popular tool used to estimate risk tolerance and myopic loss aversion. Holden and Tilahun (2021) tested and found that the simple one-shot version of this game that is attractive as a simple tool to elicit risk tolerance among respondents with limited education, produce significant endowment effects in two variants of the game where alternatively safe and risky initial monetary endowments are allocated. In this paper, we use an alternative treatment that does not induce endowment effects. This allows us to establish a benchmark to assess the relative size of the endowment effects when initial safe and risky endowments are provided (contribution 1). While Prospect Theory could predict endowment effects in the game, it fails to explain the dominance of interior choices (partial investment). We propose an alternative endowment effect theory that gives predictions that are more consistent with the observed partial investment behavior (contribution 2)
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Jul 1, 2018
We investigate the extent of variation in output sharing in land rental contracts and alternative... more We investigate the extent of variation in output sharing in land rental contracts and alternative hypotheses to explain this variation. Close to half of the rental contracts in our study in northern Ethiopia have output shares that deviate from the dominant 50-50 equal sharing. Variation in land quality, the relative bargaining power of landlords and tenants, production risks and shocks are hypothesized to influence output shares. Matched data of landlords and tenants are used. The importance of endogenous matching of landlords and tenants is investigated by assessing how endogenous tenant characteristics are correlated with landlord characteristics. We find evidence of negative assortative matching for key resource characteristics. A control function approach is used to control for endogenous matching in the output share models. The results reveal that production risks as well as relative bargaining power affect output shares in the reverse tenancy setting with tenants being relatively wealthier and influential than landlords.
Understanding the problem of land degradation in a given spatial and temporal context, requires l... more Understanding the problem of land degradation in a given spatial and temporal context, requires looking at the community baseline conditions such as the natural resource base, human resources, existing institutions and infrastructure base, and how these conditions interact with policies and institutions to influence human responses and thereby affect productivity, livelihood security and the natural resource base. This study provides a description of the land users' priorities, attitudes and perceptions, household characteristics and socio-economic status, access to credit, and farm inputs, tenurial arrangements and variations in land quality and technology characteristics and their effects on the households' interest in and ability to invest in conservation technologies based on a preliminary statistical analysis from a survey of 400 households in 16 communities carried out in 1998. Furthermore, it poses important questions that could serve as basis for further rigorous econometric analysis and future research endeavor.Norges Forskningsrå
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Apr 1, 2007
The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encoura... more The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at .
Social Science Research Network, 2003
We thank John McPeak and participants at the May 2003 conference at Cornell University on "Reconc... more We thank John McPeak and participants at the May 2003 conference at Cornell University on "Reconciling Rural Poverty Reduction and Resource Conservation" for helpful comments on an earlier draft. We acknowledge support from the Research Council of Norway, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through grant No. LAG-A-00-96-90016-00 to the BASIS CRSP. Any remaining errors are solely our own.
Environmental & resource economics, Mar 18, 2024
While economists in the past tended to assume that individual preferences, including risk prefere... more While economists in the past tended to assume that individual preferences, including risk preferences, are stable over time, a recent literature has developed and indicates that risk preferences respond to shocks, with mixed evidence on the direction of the responses. This paper utilizes a natural experiment with covariate (drought) and idiosyncratic shocks in combination with an independent field risk experiment. The risk experiment uses a Certainty Equivalent-Multiple Choice List approach and is played 1-2 years after the subjects were (to a varying degree) exposed to a covariate drought shock or idiosyncratic shocks for a sample of resource-poor young adults living in a risky semi-arid rural environment in Sub-Saharan Africa. The experimental approach facilitates a comprehensive assessment of shock effects on experimental risk premiums for risky prospects with varying probabilities of good and bad outcomes. The experiment also facilitates the estimation of the utility curvature in an Expected Utility (EU) model and, alternatively, separate estimation of probability weighting and utility curvature in three different Rank Dependent Utility models with a two-parameter Prelec probability weighting function. Our study is the first to comprehensively test the theoretical predictions of Gollier and
World Development, Jun 1, 2020
• The study uses land registry data from Tigray region of Ethiopia from 1998 and 2016 • Average f... more • The study uses land registry data from Tigray region of Ethiopia from 1998 and 2016 • Average farm size has declined from 1.15 to 0.90 ha over the time period • The documented female landholding share is 48.8% in 2016 • The farm size per household Gini increased from 0.38 in 1998 to 0.50 in 2016.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2013
Making use of a unique tenant-landlord matched data from the Tigray region of Ethiopia, we are ab... more Making use of a unique tenant-landlord matched data from the Tigray region of Ethiopia, we are able to show how strategic response of tenants -to varying economic and tenure security status of the landlords -is important in explaining productivity differentials of sharecroppers. The results show that sharecroppers' yield are significantly lower on plots leased from landlords who are non-kin; female; with lower income generating opportunity; and tenure insecure households, than on plots leased from landlords with contrasting characteristics. While, on aggregate, the result shows no significant efficiency loss on kin-operated sharecropped plots, a more decomposed analyses indicate strong evidences of Marshallian inefficiency on kin-operated plots leased from landlords with weaker bargaining power and higher tenure insecurity. This study, thus, shows how failure to control for such heterogeneity of landowners' characteristics can explain the lack of clarity in the existing empirical literature on the extent of moral hazard problems in sharecropping contracts.
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Papers by Stein T. Holden