University of Georgia

The University of Georgia is dedicated to creating a dependable food supply and advancing economic growth. The College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences (CAES) works to support Georgia’s food and fiber industry, as well as working around the world and nationwide through partnerships with international organizations. CAES is home to centers working with plant breeding and genomics, food quality, and more.

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Publications

Preprint

Intimate partner violence and women’s economic preferences

2025Anderberg, Dan; Cassidy, Rachel; Dam, Anaya; Hidrobo, Melissa; Leight, Jessica; Morsink, Karlijn

Details

Intimate partner violence and women’s economic preferences

One in three women globally experiences intimate partner violence (IPV), yet little is known about how such trauma affects economic decision-making. We provide causal evidence that IPV influences women’s time preferences – a key parameter in models of savings, investment, and labor supply. We combine two empirical strategies using four distinct datasets. First, in two randomized recall experiments in Ethiopia, we randomly assigned women to recall specific acts of abuse before eliciting their intertemporal choices. Women with IPV experiences prompted to recall IPV display significantly greater impatience than otherwise similar women who are not prompted. Second, we exploit exogenous reductions in IPV generated by two randomized interventions – one involving cash transfers, the other psychotherapy – and use treatment assignment as an instrument for IPV exposure. Women who experience reduced IPV as a result of treatment exhibit more patient time preferences. Together, these results provide consistent, novel causal evidence that exposure to IPV induces individuals to discount the future more heavily. This evidence suggests a psychological channel through which violence can perpetuate economic disadvantage and constrain women’s ability to take actions – such as saving, investing, or exiting abusive relationships – that require planning over time.

Year published

2025

Authors

Anderberg, Dan; Cassidy, Rachel; Dam, Anaya; Hidrobo, Melissa; Leight, Jessica; Morsink, Karlijn

Citation

Anderberg, Dan; Cassidy, Rachel; Dam, Anaya; Hidrobo, Melissa; Leight, Jessica; and Morsink, Karlijn. 2025. Intimate partner violence and women’s economic preferences. Preprint available online July 15, 2025. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2507.10416

Country/Region

Ethiopia

Keywords

Africa; Eastern Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Decision Making; Domestic Violence; Economics; Women; Gender

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Links

https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2507.10416 Source record

Record type

Preprint

Journal Article

Land Reform and Child Health in the Kyrgyz Republic

2024Kosec, Katrina; Shemyakina, Olga N.

Details

Land Reform and Child Health in the Kyrgyz Republic

Can the establishment of private property rights to land improve child health and nutrition outcomes? We exploit a natural experiment in the Kyrgyz Republic following the collapse of socialism, whereby the government rapidly liquidated state and collective farms containing 75 percent of agricultural land and distributed it to individuals, providing 99-year transferable use rights. We use household surveys collected before, during, and after the privatization reform and spatial variation in its timing to identify its health and nutrition impacts. We find that young children aged 0-5 exposed to land privatization for longer periods of time accumulated significantly greater gains in height- and weight- for-age z-scores, both critical measures of long-term child health and nutrition. Health improvements appear to be driven by increases in consumption of home-produced food rather than increased income from sale of production, likely due to under-developed markets. We find minimal impacts on urban-dwelling children affected only indirectly by the reform.

Year published

2024

Authors

Kosec, Katrina; Shemyakina, Olga N.

Citation

Kosec, Katrina; and Shemyakina, Olga. 2024. Land reform and child health in the Kyrgyz Republic. Economic Development and Cultural Change 72(2). https://doi.org/10.1086/719463

Country/Region

Kyrgyzstan

Keywords

Asia; Central Asia; Land Reform; Health; Children; Nutrition; Privatization; Land Tenure; Child Nutrition; Child Health; Capacity Development

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1086/719463 Source record

Project

Fragility, Conflict, and Migration

Record type

Journal Article

Leveraging prior biological knowledge improves prediction of tocochromanols in maize grain

2023

Tanaka, Ryokei; Wu, Di; Li, Xiaowei; Tibbs-Cortes, Laura E.; Wood, Joshua C.; Magallanes-Lundback, Maria; Bornowski, Nolan; Hamilton, John P.; Vaillancourt, Brieanne; Li, Xianran

…more

Deason, Nicholas T.; Schoenbaum, Gregory R.; C. Buell, Robin; DellaPenna, Dean; Yu, Jianming; Gore, Michael A.

Details

Leveraging prior biological knowledge improves prediction of tocochromanols in maize grain

With an essential role in human health, tocochromanols are mostly obtained by consuming seed oils; however, the vitamin E content of the most abundant tocochromanols in maize (Zea mays L.) grain is low. Several large-effect genes with cis-acting variants affecting messenger RNA (mRNA) expression are mostly responsible for tocochromanol variation in maize grain, with other relevant associated quantitative trait loci (QTL) yet to be fully resolved. Leveraging existing genomic and transcriptomic information for maize inbreds could improve prediction when selecting for higher vitamin E content. Here, we first evaluated a multikernel genomic best linear unbiased prediction (MK-GBLUP) approach for modeling known QTL in the prediction of nine tocochromanol grain phenotypes (12–21 QTL per trait) within and between two panels of 1,462 and 242 maize inbred lines. On average, MK-GBLUP models improved predictive abilities by 7.0–13.6% when compared with GBLUP. In a second approach with a subset of 545 lines from the larger panel, the highest average improvement in predictive ability relative to GBLUP was achieved with a multi-trait GBLUP model (15.4%) that had a tocochromanol phenotype and transcript abundances in developing grain for a few large-effect candidate causal genes (1–3 genes per trait) as multiple response variables. Taken together, our study illustrates the enhancement of prediction models when informed by existing biological knowledge pertaining to QTL and candidate causal genes.

Year published

2023

Authors

Tanaka, Ryokei; Wu, Di; Li, Xiaowei; Tibbs-Cortes, Laura E.; Wood, Joshua C.; Magallanes-Lundback, Maria; Bornowski, Nolan; Hamilton, John P.; Vaillancourt, Brieanne; Li, Xianran; Deason, Nicholas T.; Schoenbaum, Gregory R.; C. Buell, Robin; DellaPenna, Dean; Yu, Jianming; Gore, Michael A.

Citation

Tanaka, Ryokei; Wu, Di; Li, Xiaowei; Tibbs-Cortes, Laura E.; Wood, Joshua C.; Magallanes-Lundback, Maria; et al. 2023. Leveraging prior biological knowledge improves prediction of tocochromanols in maize grain. Plant Genome 16(4): e20276. https://doi.org/10.1002/tpg2.20276

Keywords

Maize; Health; Vitamin E; Genetics; Antioxidants; Quantitative Trait Loci; Gene Expression; Transcriptomics

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1002/tpg2.20276 Source record

Record type

Journal Article

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University of Georgia

Intimate partner violence and women’s economic preferences

Intimate partner violence and women’s economic preferences

Land Reform and Child Health in the Kyrgyz Republic

Land Reform and Child Health in the Kyrgyz Republic

Leveraging prior biological knowledge improves prediction of tocochromanols in maize grain

Leveraging prior biological knowledge improves prediction of tocochromanols in maize grain