The Impact of Access to Credit on the Adoption of hybrid maize in Malawi: An Empirical test of an Agricultural Household Model under credit market failure

Guided by the frame work of a household model under credit market failure, this paper aims at investigating the impact of access to credit on the adoption of hybrid maize among households that vary in their credit constraints. The data used in the study is from Malawi collected by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).Using the direct elicitation approach; households are classified into constrained and unconstrained regimes. The impact of access to credit is estimated using a switching regression in a Double-Hurdle model. Results reveal that while access to credit increases adoption among credit constrained households, it has no effect among unconstrained households. Results also show that factors that affect adoption among credit constrained households are different from those that that affect adoption among unconstrained househol