Dissertation: Essays on Conservation outcomes on Rented Farmland – Role of Gender
Diya Ganguly, Simanti Banerjee, Christopher R. Gustafson
Abstract:
The essays in this dissertation explore why female landowners may be less likely than male landowners to achieve long term conservation on their land. In Chapter 1 we develop theory to model the strategic interaction between a landowner and a tenant with a focus on their gender and implementation of conservation practices on land. Within the context of a sequential-move game, we use the principal-agent framework and identity theory to model land-use choice and equilibrium payoffs between landowner and tenant. We consider cash rent lease and discounted lease whereby the tenant pays a reduced rent if they implement conservation practices on the leased land. Our model predicts that for tenants with low valuation for the environment, prescription within a rental contract yields social identity losses that overwhelm their benefits from conservation, leading them to ignore the female landowner’s request. Therefore, the landowner must give rental discounts to the tenant to incentivize conservation. In a similar situation, male landowners can prescribe in a traditional rental set up as they undergo no social identity losses. This outcome suggests that ecosystem services benefits may be underprovided due to gender norms. In the second essay we adapt the model from Chapter 1 to design an experiment that analyzes the tenant’s choice to conserve under three types of leasing agreements – fixed rent, fixed rent with penalty and with discount, when gender of the landowners and identity norms are salient. We then use the analysis to design a controlled lab experiment in which we vary the gender of the landowner, communication opportunities and gender priming conditions. Findings indicate that male tenants do choose to conserve more for male landowners compared to female landowners. However, our conjecture about women offering more discounted rental contracts does not hold. Compared to male landowners, women landowners chose to offer more fixed rent contracts that offered neither penalty nor discount to the male tenants. Moreover, we find that male landowners offered higher discounts than women.
Diya Ganguly 