BEHAVIORAL RESPONSES TO POST-HARVEST CHALLENGES IN EAST AFRICA: LESSONS FROM FIELD EXPERIMENTS

This dissertation consists of three different essays evaluating solutions to postharvest challenges faced by farmers in Kenya and Tanzania. In the first essay we see that demand for a new storage technology the Purdue Improved Crop Storage (PICS) bags in Western Kenya, a completely new technology for almost the entire sample, was highly elastic and that a small proportion of the population would buy at the current market price. In the second essay we find evidence that farmers, who are primarily growing for maize consumption are more concerned about food safety in maize than traders, who are willing to pay less to keep the maize safer. In the third essay in Tanzania, we find that liquidity concerns at harvest prevent farmers from optimizing maize storage and sales decisions.