Research
Working Papers
Farm Household Misallocation. Job Market Paper
Abstract: Agricultural markets often fail to allocate resources efficiently across farmers in developing countries. However, policymakers require knowledge of which markets fail and how the distortions they generate are correlated. Using data from rural Thailand, I characterize how distortions in land, labor, credit, and insurance markets each contribute to misallocation. I use moments in household consumption and production data to separately identify these distortions and develop a novel method using them to structurally estimate the production function. I find that the efficient allocation would increase aggregate productivity by 20-31% relative to the status quo, while only 11-16% (5-8%) gains could be achieved by eliminating financial (input) distortions in isolation. Positive interaction effects from addressing multiple distortions simultaneously account for the remaining 4-7% TFP gains. Meanwhile, other common methods would produce 39% higher estimates of misallocation and suggest that a financial market intervention would decrease aggregate productivity. Accounting for multiple correlated distortions is therefore crucial for measuring misallocation and designing policies to address it.
Selected Work in Progress
Measuring Farm-Household Nonseparability (with Ethan Ligon). Analysis stage
Offering Postharvest Credit to Improve Farmer Welfare: Evidence from Gombe, Nigeria (with Ethan Ligon) . Data collection completed, analysis stage (AEA RCT Registry #0008022)
The Impacts of Large-Scale Land Transactions: Evidence from Ethiopia (w/ Yeshwas Admasu, Workineh Asmare Kassie, and Solomon Zena Walelign). Data collection stage
Technology Adoption and the Commercialization of Staple Crops: Evidence from Ugandan Cassava Processing (w/ Anthony Ijala, Mathew Kato, and Jérémy do Nascimento Miguel). Pilot stage
Publications
Zilberman, David, Thomas Reardon, Jed Silver, Liang Lu, and Amir Heiman. 2022. From the laboratory to the consumer: Innovation, supply chain, and adoption with applications to natural resources. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (23)
Diao, Xinshen, Eduardo Magalhaes, and Jed Silver. 2019. Cities and rural transformation: A spatial analysis of rural livelihoods in Ghana. World Development 121:141–157.