Understanding the potential impacts of climate change on economic outcomes requires knowing how agents might adapt to a changing climate. We exploit large variation in recent temperature and precipitation trends to identify adaptation to climate change in US agriculture, and use this information to generate new estimates of the potential impact of future climate change on agricultural outcomes. Longer run adaptations appear to have mitigated less than half-and more likely none-of the large negative short-run impacts of extreme heat on productivity. Limited recent adaptation implies substantial losses under future climate change in the absence of countervailing investments. (JEL Q11, Q15, Q51, Q54)

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We use a randomized experiment in India to show that improved technology enhances agricultural productivity by crowding in modern inputs and cultivation practices. Specifically, we show that a new rice variety that reduces downside risk by providing flood tolerance has positive effects on adoption of a more labor intensive planting method, area cultivated, fertilizer usage, and credit demand. We find that a large share of the expected gains from new technology comes from crowding in of other investments. Therefore, improved technologies that reduce risk by protecting production in bad years have the potential to increase agricultural productivity in normal years.

Well-defined and secure property rights over land have long been recognized as essential for economic development (Demsetz 1967;North and Thomas 1973;De Soto 2000). There are, however, different ways in which these rights can be established. Contrary to the norm in developed countries where rights are established by land titles, in many developing countries they are established by contingent use of the land. In this case, security of access requires evidence of productive use by the occupant himself, with the implication that leaving the land idle or letting it to others creates a substantial risk of loss of rights. This can be inefficient for two reasons. First, it imposes conditions on the amount of labor used on the land by requiring that it be kept in production at an accepted standard of use, ignoring the return to labor in alternative activities. Second, the common prohibition to land transactions prevents land from being reallocated from less productive to more productive users. With a focus on increasing the efficiency of land use, land certification and titling programs that remove constraints on land use and allow land transactions have been widely sponsored by national governments and international development agencies (Heath 1990).

Approximately 30% of the cultivated rice area in India is prone to crop damage from prolonged flooding. We use a randomized field experiment in 128 villages of Orissa India to show that Swarna-Sub1, a recently released submergence-tolerant rice variety, has significant positive impacts on rice yield when fields are submerged for 7 to 14 days with no yield penalty without flooding. We estimate that Swarna-Sub1 offers an approximate 45% increase in yields over the current popular variety when fields are submerged for 10 days. We show additionally that low-lying areas prone to flooding tend to be more heavily occupied by people belonging to lower caste social groups. Thus, a policy relevant implication of our findings is that flood-tolerant rice can deliver both efficiency gains, through reduced yield variability and higher expected yield, and equity gains in disproportionately benefiting the most marginal group of farmers.