Job Market Paper

 

Does sustainable intensification of maize production enhance child nutrition?

Evidence from rural Tanzania (with Nicole M. Mason and Sieglinde Snapp)

 

Food insecurity, child malnutrition, and land degradation remain persistent problems in sub-Saharan Africa. Agricultural sustainable intensification (SI) has been proposed as a possible solution to simultaneously address these challenges. Yet there is little empirical evidence on if agricultural management practices and inputs that contribute to SI from an environmental standpoint do indeed improve food security or child nutrition. We use three waves of data from the nationally-representative Tanzania National Panel Survey to analyze the child nutrition effects of rural households’ adoption of farming practices that can contribute to the SI of maize production. We group households into four categories based on their use of three soil fertility management practices on their maize plots: “Non-adoption”; “Intensification” (use of inorganic fertilizer only); “Sustainable” (use of organic fertilizer, maize-legume intercropping, or both); and “SI” (joint use of inorganic fertilizer with organic fertilizer and/or maize-legume intercropping). The results based on multinomial endogenous treatment effects models with the Mundlak-Chamberlain device consistently suggest that adoption of practices in the “SI” category improves children’s height-for-age and weight-for-age z-scores relative to “Non-adoption”, particularly for children age 25-59 months. These findings indicate that SI of maize production may have beneficial effects on child nutrition in maize-growing households in Tanzania.

 

- Revisions requested at Agricultural Economics  (Sep. 24, 2018) -

 

Other Papers

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The effects of the National Agricultural Input Voucher Scheme on

sustainable intensification of maize production in Tanzania (with Nicole M. Mason and David Mather)

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The impacts of SI of maize production on productivity and income

(with Nicole M. Mason)

 

Master Thesis

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Fluid milk processors market power in Korean Dairy Industry

- An application of the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach (with Dave D. Weatherspoon)

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The Korean dairy market has become increasingly concentrated over the past several decades, being dominated by a few large dairy processors, which indicates that there is potential for the domestic milk processors to exercise market power.  This study empirically measured whether the Korean white fluid milk processors had oligopoly power as an application of the autoregressive distributed lags (ARDL) approach.  The result of ARDL bounds testing indicates that there exists a long-run equilibrium among variables, which was not identified in the traditional methods.  The coefficients representing the market power in the long-run and short-run model are significantly different from zero, implying that the Korean milk industry is imperfectly competitive.  Based on the oligopolistic power parameters there was an upward trend until 2003, then a downward trend, implying that white fluid milk processors exerted more oligopoly until 2003 but then less market power steadily afterward, that is, the domestic milk market has become more competitive over time.