Seeding the seeds: Role of social structure in agricultural technology diffusion

Alain de Janvry, Manaswini Rao and Elisabeth Sadoulet

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2025, vol. 236, issue C

Abstract: Exploiting a two-stage randomized introduction of flood resistant seeds at village and individual-levels, we find that the extent of agricultural technology diffusion in the long run has a significant correlation with the local social structure (e.g., the jati-caste system) in India. We leverage pre-determined village-level social group compositions, where some villages are relatively more homogeneous than the others, to examine subsequent diffusion of agricultural technology following the initial, randomized seeding over the next five years. There are two main take-away. First, modest overall difference in adoption between treated and control villages is largely explained by the degree of heterogeneity in village-level social composition. Second, we observe immediate diffusion among non-recipient farmers in the same social group as the initial, treated recipients and limited diffusion among groups with lower social ranks. These findings highlight the potential efficiency and equity limitations of randomized seeding of new technology in a context with market frictions and limited trade across social groups.

Keywords: Technology diffusion; Social structures; Culture; Sustainable agriculture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O33 Q12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268125002070
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:236:y:2025:i:c:s0167268125002070

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107088

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().