Farmers often buy water using fixed fees—rather than with marginal prices. We use two randomized controlled trials in Bangladesh to study the relationship between prices, adoption of a water-saving technology, and usage. Our first experiment shows that technology only saves when farmers face second finds an encouragement voluntarily convert hourly pumping charges does not save water. Taken toge...

This paper evaluates the impact of access to groundwater on poverty using data from rural India. The estimation exploits the fact that the technology required to access groundwater changes exogenously due to constraints imposed by laws of physics at a depth of eight meters. I find that rural poverty in areas where depth from surface is below the cutoff is 9 to10 percent higher. Using survey dat...

Agricultural research drives increases in agricultural productivity, and the number of private agricultural input firms has been declining. The empirical relationship between the number of firms doing applied biotechnology crop research and the amount of research output they produce is investigated in a research profit function model. Increases in seed industry concentration have reduced biotec...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which trust directly affects public support for biotechnology, particularly in applications to food production and genetic modification of crop plants. Unlike previous research in which trust is assumed to be exogenous, this paper posits that trust is endogenously determined. An econometric model is developed that controls for the endogeneit...

Theorem 1 Suppose X is a smooth toric Fano 4-fold. Then X admits a totally nondegenerate abelian surface if X = P4, if X = P1 × P3 (type B4), or if X is a product of two smooth toric Del Pezzo surfaces (i.e. of type C4, D13, H8, L7, L8, L9, Q10, Q11, K4, U5, S2 × S2, S2 × S3 or S3 × S3). Otherwise there is no such embedding, unless possibly X is of type C3, D7, D10, D11, D14, D17, D18, G3, G4, ...