Three Essays in Development Economics

This dissertation examines how behavioral biases, producer–consumer linkages, and household constraintsshape agricultural and labor decisions in sub-Saharan Africa. Chapter 1 tests whether weatherinduced recency bias lowers fertilizer use among Nigerian maize farmers. Using nationally representative panel data merged with historical rainfall, I show that—conditional on past profit (proxied by livestock accumulation and the prior season’s maize price)—recent rainfall shocks significantly influence current fertilizer use even though shocks are serially uncorrelated and transitory; the effect is also negatively asymmetric, with prior negative shocks reducing fertilizer use more than prior positive shocks increase it. Chapter 2 quantifies bias in consumer demand estimation when the farm profit effect—the additional income producers receive when staple prices rise—is ignored. Using consumption data from Malawi, I compare elasticities and simulated outcomes from the standard Exact Affine Stone Index (EASI) and fully interacted EASI models to a preferred agricultural household EASI model that incorporates the profit effect by endogenizing real total expenditure. Chapter 3 studies how child health (stunting) affects mothers’ labor supply in Malawi. Instrumenting stunting with in-utero exposure to extreme heat, I find that poor child health reduces maternal farm-wage participation—especially for sons—while other labor margins show no effect and maternal education remains a strong predictor of work.