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Full-Text Articles in Behavioral Economics
Three Essays On Learning And Conflict Applied To Developing Countries, Amal Ahmad
Three Essays On Learning And Conflict Applied To Developing Countries, Amal Ahmad
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation uses microeconomics to study questions of learning and conflict in developing countries. The first essay studies how much rural producers in developing countries can learn from their own experience to redress important information gaps about their crop. It builds a theoretical model of learning from experience and applies it using a rich dataset on cotton farmers in Pakistan. I test whether farmers learn from cultivation experience about the pest resistance of their seeds and use this information to improve selection and productivity. I find no such learning effect and this conclusion is robust to several parameters that could …