Agricultural risk and remittances: the case of Uganda

The economic literature showed that remittances can replace missing credit and insurance markets. As a result, it is natural to expect that higher amounts of remittances will motivate agricultural farmers to engage in riskier activities. The present study aims to verify the latter hypothesis by answering three distinct questions: do households that receive higher remittances choose to cultivate a riskier crop portfolio, to engage either in crop specialization or in crop diversification and to use riskier input such as fertilizer? I use the Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) dataset on Uganda established by the World Bank to test these hypotheses. The results show that higher remittances induce crop specialization and higher probability of fertilizer use