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Abstract
This paper evaluates the short-term impacts of a development project that aims to
increase mango yields, sales of mango products, and the income of small mango
farmers in rural Haiti. Various matching methods, in combination with difference-indifference
(DID), are used to deal with the potential selection bias associated with
nonrandom treatment assignment. Our results show that in a 16-month period, the
project increased the number of young mango trees planted and encouraged the
adoption of best practices. But the project has not yet led to a noticeable increase in
total sales. The adoption of improved production practices is too recent to translate
into significant changes in production and sales. While the robustness check suggests
that the results are not caused by the presence of other similar programs on the same
sites, the Rosenbaum bounds sensitivity analysis suggests that the matching results
are robust against “hidden bias” arising from unobserved outcome variables in some
but not all cases.