Soft Skills for Hard Constraints: Evidence from High-Achieving Female Farmers

Research output: Working paperWorking papers

Authors

This paper documents the positive link between the noncognitive skills of women farmers and the adoption of a cash crop. The context is Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, where the majority of rural households practice subsistence farming. The analysis finds that a one standard deviation increase in noncognitive ability related to perseverance is associated with a five percentage point (or 33 percent) increase in the probability of adoption of the main cash crop. This link is not explained by differences across women in education and cognitive skills. It is also not explained by the fact that women with higher noncognitive ability tend to be married to husbands of higher noncognitive ability and education. The effect of female noncognitive skills on adoption is concentrated in patrilocal communities, where women face greater adversity and thus where it would be expected that the returns to such skills would be highest. One main channel through which noncognitive skills seem to work is through the use of productive inputs, including higher levels of labor, fertilizer, and agricultural advice services.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationWashington
PublisherThe World Bank
Number of pages33
Publication statusPublished - 06.08.2017

Recently viewed

Researchers

  1. Oliver Obermann

Publications

  1. Explaining and controlling for the psychometric properties of computer-generated figural matrix items
  2. Individual Scans Fusion in Virtual Knowledge Base for Navigation of Mobile Robotic Group with 3D TVS
  3. Introduction to Felipe Ehrenberg's "In Search of a Model for Life"
  4. How generative drawing affects the learning process
  5. Article 11: Formal validity
  6. Detection of coherent oceanic structures via transfer operators
  7. Assessment of cognitive load in multimedia learning with dual-task methodology
  8. Scattered trees are keystone structures - Implications for conservation
  9. Turbulente Ränder
  10. Testing for a break in the persistence in yield spreads of EMU government bonds
  11. From theory to experience
  12. Response of saproxylic beetles to small-scale habitat connectivity depends on trophic levels
  13. Precision Denoising in Medical Imaging via Generative Adversarial Network-Aided Low-Noise Discriminator Technique
  14. Non-local modeling of size effects in amorphous metals
  15. CETUS – a baseline approach to type extraction
  16. The total Archive On the Function of Not-Knowing in digital Culture
  17. Construction of Container Terminal 4
  18. How are strategy maps linked to strategic and organizational change?
  19. Group evaluations as self-group distancing
  20. Assessing tree dendrometrics in young regenerating plantations using terrestrial laser scanning
  21. In situ synchrotron radiation diffraction study of the role of Gd, Nd on the elevated temperature compression behavior of ZK40
  22. Effect of the Zn content on the compression behaviour of Mg5Nd(Zn)
  23. The diffusion of sustainable family farming practices in Colombia
  24. Adventures of Anti-Dialectic
  25. Risk preferences under heterogeneous environmental risk
  26. The making of an intrinsic property