Market Access and Quality Upgrading: Evidence from Four Field Experiments. A Replication Study of Bold et al. (American Economic Review, 2022)

Abstract

Bold et al. (2022) investigate the effect of providing access to a larger, centralized market where quality is rewarded with a premium on farm productivity and framing incomes from smallholder maize farmers in western Uganda, using a series of randomized experiments and a difference-in-differences approach. We successfully reproduce the results of this study using the publicly provided replication packet. Then test the robustness of these results by re-defining treatment and outcome variables, testing for model misspecification and the leverage of outliers, and testing for non-random selection in the Fisher-permutation process. Our results show that the findings in Bold et al. (2022) are robust to a variety of decisions in the research process. This evokes confidence in the internal validity of the findings.