MARUP HOSSAIN

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I am an applied economist working on contemporary agricultural and development issues. I am currently working as an economist in the research and impact assessment division at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). In addition to my primary job at IFAD, I work as a consultant at the World Bank and UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF). I have a Ph.D. in applied economics from the University of Florida, USA.My research areas are access to finance, entrepreneurship, and resilience. I conduct randomized control trials and ex-post impact assessment studies to evaluate different development interventions. I also work on measurement and targeting effectiveness issues using different econometric and supervised machine learning tools. My research works have been published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Development Policy Review, Food Policy, Food Security, and World Development.

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Papers by MARUP HOSSAIN

The role of access to finance in disaster recovery: Evidence from coastal communities in India

Journal of Agricultural Economics

Natural disasters affect economic activities and welfare of small‐scale producers in developing c... more Natural disasters affect economic activities and welfare of small‐scale producers in developing countries, but may also offer opportunities to reinvest in productive asset, economic capital, and new technologies for future economic prospects. This paper investigates the impacts of a livelihood recovery project that provided access to finance and rehabilitated communal infrastructures in the coastal communities of Tamil Nadu, India which were severely affected by the 2004 tsunami. We replicate the project's eligibility criteria to build the counterfactual to identify control households based on the validation of secondary data and administrative records. Using data from a carefully designed primary survey, we estimate the impacts of providing access to finance and rehabilitating communal infrastructures on economic and livelihood outcomes. Results indicate positive and significant impacts on income, asset and food security. These impacts are mainly driven by improved access to fi...

Using evaluation data to predict loan performance among poor borrowers: The case of BRAC’s asset transfer and microcredit programmes

Development Policy Review, 2022

SummaryMotivationAnti‐poverty programmes can work as a comprehensive data source of poor househol... more SummaryMotivationAnti‐poverty programmes can work as a comprehensive data source of poor households’ economic behaviour and performance, a resource that is particularly scarce in environments without formal credit scores or households that have minimal involvement in economic activities.PurposeThis study examines the potential role of information generated by an anti‐poverty programme on self‐selection by borrowers (i.e., applying for a loan), screening applicants by lenders (i.e., loan approval), and borrower performance in the microcredit market.Methods and approachWe apply the logistic regression, Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO), and Random Forest (RF) methods to predict self‐selection, screening, and post‐loan outcomes.FindingsWe show that the rate of accurate prediction is about 70% for self‐selection and screening. We find that the prediction accuracy rate is 68% for productive use and 91% for repayment difficulty. Objective indicators (e.g., income, as...

Migration and household decision on occupational choice and investment: Evidence from Bangladesh

We study the roles of migration and remittances along with other income sources on investment dec... more We study the roles of migration and remittances along with other income sources on investment decisions in rural Bangladesh. We estimate households' investment equations conditional on their participation in and income from alternative (farm and non-farm) activities in the context of household's current endowments and existing market structures. Using a true household-level panel data from rural Bangladesh covering 2000, 2004, and 2008 with 1223 sample points, we estimate the effects of migration and remittances on household's investment in own cultivated land, land rent out to other households, livestock and non-farm business capital. Results show that remittances decrease household own cultivated land and also decrease land rent out to other households. We explain this result by controlling households labor endowments, education status and existing market imperfections. Our results also show that female headed households overall invest less in self-employment activitie...

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Measuring household food security in a low income country: A comparative analysis of self-reported and objective indicators

Measuring food security in an accurate and cost effective way is important for targeted food reli... more Measuring food security in an accurate and cost effective way is important for targeted food relief and for designing anti-poverty programs. A number of studies have established different food security indicators as alternatives to calorie intake but none has conducted a comparative study of multiple indicators. We present a comparative analysis of 3 alternative indicators, (a) dietary diversity score (DDS) (b) self-reported food security and (c) land holding, as alternatives to calorie intake for prediction of household food security. We assess the reliability of the 3 indicators through their relation with household calorie intake, food and non-food expenditure, and nutritional status. We use a nationally representative cross sectional data consisting of 4,423 households from Bangladesh. We find no systematic difference in association with access to food (as measured by household food and non-food expenditure) among the alternative indicators. We also find that the land indicator ...

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Asset transfer and child labor: Evidence from a field experiment in Bangladesh

Review of Agri-Food Chain Interventions Aimed at Enhancing Consumption of Nutritious Food by the Poor: Bangladesh

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Matching Grants to Boost Horticulture in Rwanda: Targeting, Input use, and Pro it

Matching grants can boost investment and pro it of smallholders by lowering the price of investme... more Matching grants can boost investment and pro it of smallholders by lowering the price of investment and relaxing the credit and(or) risk constraints. Yet the success of these interventions depends on who receive grants and where those are invested. We evaluate the impacts of a matching grant scheme targeted to horticulture farmers in Rwanda. The program requires farmers to develop business plans, apply and get loans from inancial institutions, and repay 50% of the loans in order to receive matching as a payment for rest of loan. Using the regression discontinuity framework, we show that grants increase labor employment and improve technical ef iciency of farmers. Additionally, we ind that only endorsing business plans has no signi icant effect on any outcomes. We show that the initial ranking of farmers does a poor job in explaining the loan approval decisions and horticulture pro it. Our results bolster the need for an improved targeting and/or alter‐ natives to grants, given the i...

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Rising Food Price, Asset Transfers, and Household Food Security

We study the role of food price rising and income generating assets as determinants of household ... more We study the role of food price rising and income generating assets as determinants of household food insecurity among the extreme poor in rural Bangladesh for the period 2002-2011. We do so in the context of an anti-poverty program, targeting the ultra-poor (TUP), which transferred productive livestock assets to the very poor. We find a positive significant impact of the asset transfers on household’s food security irrespective of whether we use subjective or objective measures of food security. Most importantly we find that the long-term impact of the program (estimated over 2002-2011) is smaller compared to mid-term (2002-2008) and short-term (2002-2005) impacts for all the indicators. We test whether this declining program impact is driven by the steep rise in food prices in the post-2007 period. We find that in the pre-crisis period participant households benefited while in the post crisis period they affected negatively by the price shock. This result explains the declining ef...

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Impact Assessment of Credit Program for Tenant Farmers in Bangladesh: Evidence from a Field Experiment

CIRJE F-Series, 2016

We study the role of agricultural credit on productivity and livelihoods of small, marginal, and ... more We study the role of agricultural credit on productivity and livelihoods of small, marginal, and landless tenant farmers based on a randomized control trial (RCT) field experiment in Bangladesh. Twenty percent of the eligible households from the treatment group participate in the credit program and utilize sixty percent of their loans for agricultural purposes. Results show that access to credit increases adoption of modern seed varieties, productivity, and farming income in the treatment group. We find that impacts are heterogeneous over households0 headship, tenancy status, and farm size. We also examine distributional impacts using quantile regressions and find that impacts of the credit are mostly concentrated in the upper tail of the distributions.

Smallholder Agriculture Development Project (SADP) in Lesotho

RIDIE datasets

Matching grants and economic activities among horticultural entrepreneurs: Long-term evidence from Rwanda

World Development, 2022

Food systems and structural and rural transformation: a quantitative synthesis for low and middle-income countries

Food Security, 2021

Structural and rural transformation in a country are intricately linked to food system outcomes. ... more Structural and rural transformation in a country are intricately linked to food system outcomes. Structural transformation captures a country’s level of dependence on agriculture, while rural transformation captures the productivity in the agricultural sector. Specifically, the agri-food system and employment transitions accompany country transformations and shape the spatial distribution of populations by influencing where people live, work and eat, all of which closely relate to food system transitions. We create a food systems index (FSI) capturing a rich set of drivers established in the literature. Using country level data from 85 low and middle-income countries (LMIC’s), we analyse the linkages between food system, structural and rural transformations as well as spatial population distributions. We also analyse a large number of policy relevant variables using machine-learning methodology to shed light on patterns related to institutions, female empowerment, infrastructure and health. Our analysis indicates that rural-dominant countries in the lowest FSI group will see their youth populations more than double in the next 30 years, indicating that their food system investments today will affect one third of global youth in the future. Medium FSI countries need to invest more in the semi-rural and peri-urban areas. We find that structural transformation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for desirable food system outcomes. Rural transformation by itself without structural transformation is not enough either. For LMIC’s, broad development interventions such as financial and digital connectivity as well as women’s empowerment loom more important than narrowly focused interventions regarding progress in the food system.

Migration and economic activity among origin households: the role of female household headship

International migration is an important source of employment and remittances for households in th... more International migration is an important source of employment and remittances for households in the developing world. In a male-dominated international migration system, females are more likely to head households after the exit of a migrant. In this study, we decompose impacts of international migration into effects attributable to a change in the gender of the household head and effects attributable to other mechanisms. We use an unbalanced panel dataset collected over fourteen years from 2000-2014 in Bangladesh, where international migrants are almost all men. Combining instrumental variable estimation with causal mediation methods, we find that sending an international migrant reduces household participation in crop farming, livestock production, and non-farm businesses at the intensive and extensive margins. However, the average impacts of changes in the gender of the household head due to migration show an opposite effect. We find similar results for input expenditure, capital s...

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Poverty Prediction and Targeting Over Time and Space: Evidence from Nigeria

SSRN Electronic Journal