2026 Theses Doctoral

Essays in Development Economics

Basavappa, Nikhil

This dissertation consists of three chapters collectively studying the rural poor, the policies and tools that shape their welfare, and the social and environmental contexts that mediate their responses. These chapters focus, in particular, on smallholder farmers, who are among the world's most exposed to climate change.

In the first chapter, we study how the severity of externalities determines whether efficient technologies lead to the conservation or overextraction of a common pool resource. India is the world’s largest groundwater user, with 90% used for agriculture. Groundwater, however, is a common pool resource, generating a tragedy of the commons that threatens agricultural sustainability. We develop a parsimonious model to show how a popular policy intervention — subsidizing efficient irrigation technology — can exacerbate distortions away from socially optimal groundwater extraction. We test the model's predictions by leveraging geophysical variation in extraction externalities and a $1.35 billion program subsidizing efficient irrigation. Consistent with the model's predictions, the policy's impact depends on the severity of extraction externalities: extraction falls 9.2% in low-externality areas but rises 11.0% in high-externality areas. Low-externality farmers maintain cultivation using less groundwater, while high-externality farmers cultivate more intensively. Finally, the policy produces divergent impacts on farmers’ exposure to climate risk: in low-externality areas, farmers conserve groundwater during normal rainfall years and extract more during drought years to smooth water input, while in high-externality areas, farmers increase extraction during normal years, depleting their capacity to extract during droughts and exacerbating their exposure to climate variability. Our findings illustrate that the same common pool conditions that typically justify an intervention may also determine its welfare implications.

In the second chapter, I study how climate shocks shift farmers' demand for information and how adaptive capacity mediates that demand. Agricultural extension services provide information intended to help farmers improve productivity and adapt to climate change. However, the efficacy of supplying information depends on two oft-unobserved factors: the underlying demand for it, and the capacity to act on it. Using farmer-initiated calls to a national helpline in India, I show that climate shocks increase demand for information when they are not only agronomically damaging but also unusual relative to local climate history. Growing-phase call volume rises 6.5 percent in response to damaging heat and 4.6 percent in response to abnormally high precipitation. Farmers seek information both about the conditions they face (weather) and about how to respond (crop management). Exploiting exogenous geophysical variation in access to groundwater — a key tool for mitigating drought and heat damages — I find that farmers with better groundwater access call more in response to these shocks, extract more groundwater to buffer them, and suffer less vegetation damage.

In the third chapter, we examine information that smallholder farmers seek from each other, what information they value, and what frictions impede the diffusion of that information. Agricultural productivity in developing countries depends on the diffusion of knowledge through informal networks, yet beneficial information often fails to flow between farmers. We study which frictions may impede agricultural information exchange using two complementary experiments among maize farmers in Western Kenya. The first pairs farmers with a knowledgeable peer and randomizes small financial incentives either to seek her peer's information or for the peer to share it, varying whether the incentive is known to one or both parties. The second elicits willingness to pay for different information bundles, measures preferences over the attributes of information sources and recipients, and documents the concerns farmers hold about sharing. Farmers value peer-held information---the average willingness to pay is KSh 240 (approximately $2)---and small incentives increase the probability that a farmer can correctly report her knowledgeable peer's harvest one week later by 22 percentage points. Information that includes harvest outcomes commands a willingness-to-pay premium of 171 KSh over inputs-only information, and its inclusion is the strongest predictor of whether farmers choose to acquire or share information. Farmers also strongly prefer information from skilled, nearby sources. When asked about concerns related to sharing, farmers more commonly report reputational concerns---resentment and blame---than competitive concerns, such as price effects.