Climate change hurts farmers by lowering crop yields. In this paper, I show that it also hurts farmers by reshaping the markets they sell in. To document this, I exploit extreme drought shocks in the water-intensive Indian sugar industry that produces a fifth of all sugar worldwide, and where 8M smallholders sell perishable cane to oligopsonistic sugar mill intermediaries. I assemble a newly digitized 35-year administrative panel on the universe of Indian sugar mills, and a georeferenced farmer-mill transaction panel on 3M cane farmers. Using a staggered event study design, I show that droughts concentrate markets by removing the least productive mills, and trigger long-term productivity growth within survivors through managerial upgrading. Yet farm-gate cane prices fall as these gains are captured by survivors through wider markdowns. Reduced cane prices account for one half of farmers' income losses - on par with the yield losses themselves - pointing to a large role for market structure in shaping farmers' climate burden. To quantify aggregate welfare impacts, I build and estimate an equilibrium model of the Indian sugar sector, and use it to evaluate price-based policies that protect farmers.

In principle, firms in developing countries benefit from the fact that advanced technologies have already been developed in industrialized countries and can simply be adopted. But for many firms this advantage remains elusive. In this project, I investigate the role of market competition in spurring quality upgrading within the Indian sugar industry – the world’s second largest, yet highly unproductive. To overcome measurement challenges that have hindered empirical progress on the subject, I use novel long-term administrative records on the universe of sugar manufacturers in India that comprise direct measures of plant-level technology, management and production. For identification, I rely on a natural experiment that introduces market competition in sugarcane markets with varied intensities in the state of Maharashtra - India's largest sugar producer. I document persistent effects of competition at each stage of the sugar value chain with significant benefits for both sugarcane farmers and sugar manufacturers.

Agricultural value chains in developing countries connect a large number of smallholders to a small set of downstream buyers under weak contract enforcement. This review examines how two important features of these markets – buyer power and relational contracting – jointly shape prices, production, investment, and farmer welfare. We organize recent empirical evidence around a common framework linking farmers, intermediaries, and downstream buyers. Three main conclusions emerge. First, buyer power depends not only on the number of buyers but also on their conduct and farmers’ ability to switch across buyers and activities. Second, market power at different stages of the value chain can interact in ways that make the effects of policy difficult to predict. Intermediaries may exercise market power while also providing valuable services, so higher farm-gate prices do not necessarily imply higher farmer welfare. Third, market power and relational contracting are closely connected: competition improves outside options but can also reduce the rents needed to sustain informal agreements. We argue that future work should study market power and relational contracting jointly and evaluate agricultural policies beyond their effects on prices alone.

Voluntary carbon markets can mobilize climate finance for low-income countries through nature-based solutions like agroforestry, which combines carbon sequestration with farmer resilience. Yet existing projects exhibit very low tree survival rates, reflecting two key failures in standard contracting models: adverse selection - as low-commitment landowners self-select into programs, and moral hazard - as farmer distrust of developers depresses maintenance effort. We study how contract design can mitigate these information asymmetries to improve market performance and strengthen climate adaptation. Partnering with a large agroforestry project developer in India, we implement a 2×2 cross-randomized controlled trial across 250 village clusters and 2,500 farmers. Each dimension of the factorial design targets a distinct information asymmetry: one varies contract features that screen on farmer commitment to address adverse selection, while the other varies developer-side investments that build relational trust to address moral hazard. We evaluate impacts on four outcome families: (1) selection; (2) tree survival and carbon sequestration measured via drone-based digital MRV; (3) income diversification and consumption smoothing under climate shocks; (4) and environmental co-benefits including soil health and groundwater recharge.

Cooperative firms must decide how many of their input suppliers to admit as members. More members expand the captive supply base and increase processing throughput, but dilute per-member surplus through profit-sharing and extension service provision. Despite cooperatives' prevalence in agricultural markets worldwide, little is known about how this trade-off is resolved in practice. I study this question in India's sugar industry, where cooperative mills procure sugarcane from both member and non-member farmers – yet only a third of suppliers hold membership. Using farmer- and mill-level panel data covering the universe of both cane farmers and sugar mills in Maharashtra, I develop and estimate a structural model in which cooperatives endogenously choose membership thresholds while competing with private mills for farmer supply in a spatial oligopsony. The model features a nested discrete choice framework for farmer mill selection, an oligopsony pricing game among private mills, and a cooperative membership rule that trades off supply expansion against dividend dilution and governance costs. Counterfactual simulations quantify the welfare consequences of mandating open membership, eliminating cooperatives, and adjusting membership policy under climate stress.

Recent research highlights how climate damages can be mitigated through sectoral reallocation, crop reallocation, and reducing trade and migration barriers. In this project, I evaluate the potential for reallocation between agricultural and non-agricultural production on the basis of farm size to serve as a margin of climate adaptation, and examine how input market and sectoral mobility frictions can hamper this process. I study this question in the context of India, a highly climate-vulnerable economy comprising 25% of the world's farms, proceeding in three steps. First, I present empirical estimates showing that productivity losses from rising temperatures are only half as large on larger farms relative to smaller ones — implying substantial gains if climate-exposed countries could promote farm consolidation and facilitate labour reallocation from vulnerable small farms into non-agriculture. Second, I document that long-run responses to rising temperatures see a shrinking of average farm sizes, driven by a decline in the number of large farms rather than the consolidation that efficient adaptation would predict. This points to an important role for input market frictions. Third, to rationalize these findings, I develop a theoretical framework embedding input market and sectoral mobility frictions in a Melitz model, and use it to quantify how these frictions dampen the gains from climate adaptation.