Essays on African rural development and environmental and natural resource policy

My dissertation consists of three essays in development economics and empirical microeconomics.The first essay investigates food security in sub-Saharan Africa and spending in agricultural research and development. A two-stage stochastic frontier analysis is carried out, and deviation from the frontier used as a proxy for inefficiency is regressed against country-specific characteristics in the second stage estimation. Countries with abundant natural resources in which the majority of people live in rural areas tend to be associated with food insecurity based on the prevalence of undernourishment and the depth of food deficit. However, when using the average value of food production and the average dietary energy supply adequacy as measures of food insecurity, resource-rich countries as well as the proportion of people living in rural areas tend to be positively associated with food security.The second essay studies the factors that affect government assistance to agriculture by specifically focusing on the African rural sector. Through policy indicators such as the relative rate of assistance to agriculture, the cash food bias index, and the World Bank trade bias index (from 1955 to 2011), a fixed effect econometric modeling analysis is carried out in order to determine how a country's GDP, rural population share, arable land share, natural resource endowment, and location explain the assistance government provides to agriculture. Results reveal a negative correlation between a country's rural population share and the level of government assistance provided to agriculture. Governments of resource-rich countries, however, adopt policies that favor agriculture when rural population is above 57 per cent.The third essay examines the determinants of households' adoption of water conservation practices for indoor and outdoor uses in Oklahoma City. Using a unique dataset that combines actual household consumption data and county assessor's data of house market value and characteristics with a survey of household water conservation methods, a logit model is used to predict the likelihood of adoption. Increased education, age, and income all were found to positively affect indoor and outdoor conservation adoption. Neither higher summer consumption during severe drought, nor the perception of prolonged drought increased outdoor conservation adoption, but owning previously conserving Bermuda lawn did increase adoption