Guush Berhane

Evaluating large-scale government investments in fertilizer adoption: The Ethiopian experience

We evaluate the impact of a large Government of Ethiopia intervention to raise fertilizer supply by establishing five fertilizer blending facilities supplying fertilizers tailored to local soil nutrient profiles. We rely on the phased geographic rollout of blending facility establishment to identify the causal effect on fertilizer use, application rates, crop yields, gross crop revenue, and household consumption. Combining effects of multiple treatment periods, each estimated using a doubly robust difference-in-difference model, we find that the blending facilities increased the probability that farmers adopt the new blended fertilizers by 22 percentage points and increased application rates by 17 kg/ha (baseline adoption was zero). The facilities mostly induced farmers who previously used DAP to switch to NPS, and we find large decreases in DAP adoption (by 22 percentage points, 47% of the control group base mean) and application rates (16 kg/ha, 52% of the control group base mean) yet no impact on overall fertilizer adoption or application rates. Though the new blended fertilizers were expected to perform better, there is no evidence they improved crop yields, crop gross revenue, or household consumption. The effect of the intervention was more pronounced (with larger increases in NPS use and larger decreases in DAP use) for farms located near demonstration plots, which the Government used to train farmers about the agronomic response to the new fertilizers. We confirm results using three large-scale longitudinal datasets and show that they are robust to choices of specification, treatment definition, and inference assumptions. JEL classification: O12, O13, Q16, Q18

Armed conflict and climate-induced weather disruptions in agricultural input use: Evidence From Ethiopia

Incentives, administrative capture and preference aggregation in community-based targeting

Community-based targeting (CBT), which leverages community leaders to identify eligible beneficiaries, is widely used in social protection programs and development interventions, especially in data-scarce settings. Yet, little is known about how these leaders respond to opportunities for potential resource leakages and elite capture, and whether such behavior is moderated by budget constraints or the level of discretion given to leaders. Similarly, how community leaders involved in CBT aggregate individual preferences into collective decisions remains understudied. We conduct a cluster-randomized experiment in 180 Ethiopian villages to study the effects of incentive structures and discretion on administrative capture—defined as funds retained under the disguise of covering “administrative” costs. Local leaders were tasked with allocating real or hypothetical transfer budgets, with discretion to retain up to 10 percent as “administrative costs”. To uncover decision-making and preference aggregation within CBT committees, we elicited these decisions (proposals to retain a portion of the budget) individually as well as collectively. We find that financial incentives significantly increase administrative (elite) capture, and that capture increases with budget size. Group decisions yield higher appropriation than individual proposals, suggesting implicit collusion rather than prosocial restraint in group-based decisions. Moreover, when real stakes are at play, group outcomes are disproportionately shaped by extreme (outlier) preferences, whereas in hypothetical settings without actual transfers, popular preferences dominate. These findings highlight behavioral mechanisms underlying collective decision-making and administrative capture in CBT, which can inform the design of more accountable CBT systems.