Speaker: Nicholas Li is an Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Toronto. More »

Abstract: Farmers in developing countries consume a large fraction of the goods they produce. Marketization costs that drive a wedge between the value of selling goods or purchasing them from the market provide one explanation. These costs can affect the gains from specialization through occupational and crop choice. Using multiple Indian data sets and the expansion of India's Public Distribution System in the 1990s and 2000s as a natural experiment I test this explanation and quantify its impacts on patterns of agricultural production.

Last Updated: Mar 28, 2016