The Effects of Risk Preferences on the Adoption of Post-Harvest Technology: Evidence from Rural Cambodia

We investigate how rice farmers’ risk preferences affect the adoption of post-harvest technology in Cambodia, focusing on moisture meters. We find that risk-averse farmers are more likely to adopt moisture meters, although the degree of farmers’ loss aversion or the extent to which they tended to overweight small probabilities do not affect the adoption. In the setting of our study, the effects of farmers’ risk preferences on agricultural technology adoption can be described by using expected utility theory. However, controlling for loss aversion and probability weighting improves the precision of examining the effects of farmers’ risk preferences on adoption.     

Does the Heterogeneity of Project Implementers Affect the Programme Participation of Beneficiaries?: Evidence from Rural Cambodia

This study employs the dataset collected for the assessment of a post-harvest technology project in rural Cambodia and focuses on the heterogeneous preferences of project implementers, frequently overlooked in the literature on programme evaluation studies. We focus on the ‘implementer effect’ on the programme participation of the treated farmers. We demonstrate that the heterogeneous programme participation of ordinary farmers could be induced due to heterogeneity in the characteristics of the project staff. In particular, we indicate that the baseline altruism of the project staff, measured by the dictator game, consistently increases the participation rate and the number of participations in the training sessions of beneficiaries. This type of heterogeneity in project staffs’ preferences across treatment sites could be a source of treatment heterogeneity for programmes conducted at a certain cluster level. While few studies have focused on the heterogeneity of programme implementers, our empirical results indicate that the preference of implementers could be a source of treatment heterogeneity and imply the importance of implementation of an actual project.     

Investigation of the methylation status around parent-of-origin detectable SNPs in imprinted genes

Methylation of CpG dinucleotides was investigated in five regions by bisulphite treatment of gDNA, PCR and cloning/sequencing. The gDNA was prepared from peripheral blood, saliva, semen, nails and hair from the head. In gDNA from peripheral blood, three regions were investigated in 16, 23 and 24 individuals, respectively (Fig. 2). In gDNA from other sources, three or five regions were investigated in five individuals (Fig. 3). In many of the sequenced fragments, all the CpG dinucleotides were either methylated or not, which support the idea that the parental origin of an allele may be determined by the methylation status of the allele. However, the methylation of CpG dinucleotides varies across the fragment in some of the sequenced fragments, especially from semen samples, which indicate that it may be difficult to determine the parental origin from some gDNA sources by restriction-enzyme analysis (DMPA method).