Animesh Jayant

Climate change imposes large and growing costs on agriculture by lowering yields. But it can also hurt farmers through the prices they receive, especially since they sell to intermediaries who wield substantial buyer power and are themselves exposed to climate shocks. An intermediary that exits strands its farmers and strengthens survivors' buyer power. However, one that adapts may raise the value of its farmers' crop and offset damages. To investigate this, I study drought-induced market restructuring in the Indian sugar industry, where farmers sell water-intensive cane to intermediary mills. Using a novel 35-year panel covering the universe of Indian sugar mills, and georeferenced transactions for 3 million cane farmers, I employ a staggered event study design to show that droughts drive the least productive mills to exit and their farmers to reallocate to nearby survivors. This reallocation raises survivors' return to upgrading and drives long-term productivity growth. Strikingly, farm-gate prices and income do not rise, with mills capturing the gains through amplified markdowns. Market restructuring plays a dual role -- it drives within-mill adaptation but suppresses the price rise that would cushion farmers' yield losses. To rationalize these findings, I develop a structural model of the Indian sugar value chain, decompose productivity gains and welfare, and evaluate policies that protect farmers while preserving intermediary adaptation.

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 (Nath, 2025), crop reallocation (Costinot et al., 2016), and reducing trade and migration barriers (Conte et al., 2021). 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 rationalise 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.

In principle, firms in developing countries benefit from the fact that advanced technologies have already been developed in industrialised countries and can simply be adopted. But for many firms this advantage remains elusive. In this project, we 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, we 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, we 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. We document persistent effects of competition at each stage of the sugar value chain with significant benefits for both sugarcane farmers and sugar manufacturers.

Voluntary carbon markets can mobilise 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-randomised 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 will evaluate impacts on four outcome families: selection; tree survival and carbon sequestration measured via drone-based digital MRV; income diversification and consumption smoothing under climate shocks; and environmental co-benefits including soil health and groundwater recharge.