Education and Agricultral Technology
Empirical Methods in Development Economics Term Paper, 2021
I use household survey data from Ethiopia to study the effect of education on the adoption of five agricultural technologies: improved seeds, fertilizer, preventative measures (e.g. pesticides), extension programs, and irrigation. To account for possible omitted variable bias I use household distance from government primary and secondary schools as instruments for education. The estimates indicate that overall education has a positive effect on all agricultural technologies studied, except for the use of agricultural extension programs for which education has a negative effect. Looking into heterogeneous effects of education across crops reveals that education has a positive effect on adoption of most technologies for major staple crops but a negative effect for non staple crops.