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Abstract
The adoption of agricultural technologies, such as improved maize varieties and fertilizers, plays an important role in improving agricultural production in Africa. Hybrid seeds and fertilizers are risky inputs, and their adoption by farmers is often very low. Farmers risk attitudes are often considered to be the reason behind low use of these technologies. Typical empirical research ignores the family dynamics that affects households agricultural choices. This dissertation project consists of two essays, where we use a collective household model to estimate the effects of experimentally derived risk preferences of both spouses in farming households interacted with relative womens bargaining power on agricultural technology adoption by farmers in Tanzania and Kenya. We use a unique dataset that combines risk preference experiment with household and individual survey data to examine how spousal attitudes towards risk affect improved maize adoption in Tanzania and fertilizer use in Kenya. The first essay examines how spousal attitudes towards risk affect improved maize adoption in Tanzania. Our results show that male loss aversion decreases the use of hybrid seeds. Households where males underweigh small probabilities are more likely to purchase improved seeds. Female risk preferences do not seem to have an effect on household seed choice when we consider all households. However, when we focus on households with empowered women, we find that female risk aversion and overweighing of small probabilities decrease households use of hybrids. In the second essay, we investigate the effects of individual risk preferences on households fertilizer use in Kenya. We find that male and female risk/loss aversion reduces the use of fertilizers in male-headed households (MHH). Loss aversion of empowered females reduces the use of fertilizer in households that invest in fertilizers. In female-headed households (FHH), we find that more loss averse females are less likely to purchase fertilizers and that more risk and loss averse females in fertilizer adopting FHH use less fertilizers.