PRODUCT DIVERSIFICATION AND ATTITUDES TOWARD RISK IN AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION

In this article we analyze the relationship between risk-avoidance behavior and economic jointness in a multi-output agricultural technology. We focus on farmer specific heterogeneity in attitudes towards risk-taking, while treating production uncertainty as unobserved stochastic error that is common to all region specific farms. We furthermore utilize a new flexible functional form, the Constant Elasticity of Transformation, Constant Elasticity of Substitution, Generalized Leontief (Behrman, Lovell, Pollak, and Sickles, [1992]) which has the appealing property of relative flexibility while ensuring proper curvature properties of the estimated multi-output technology over a larger sample region of the price/quantity space than a flexible form such as the Generalized Leontief [Diewert, 1971]. Our empirical study deals with small-scale agriculture in the Indian Semi-Arid Tropics (SAT), partly because of the importance of yield-related risk in this region, but also because we have measures of farmer specific risk attitudes in the SAT data. Our modeling approach allows for the calculation of the shadow cost of farmer specific risk attitudes in terms of foregone profits, while at the same time controlling for the technical factors that give rise to multi-output production in the absence of risk. We are thus able to estimate these opportunity costs while modeling a multiple output technology in which cost complementarities can lead to diversified production and in which joint production is not always undertaken.