Eleanor Wiseman

Eleanor Wiseman was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the King Center on Global Development. Prior to joining Stanford, she earned her PhD in Agriculture and Resource Economics at the University of California Berkeley in 2023. She was also involved with the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford.

Her research interests are in development economics, political economy and trade. Her primary research agenda focuses on informal agriculture trade and the role of corruption, bargaining, gender and information. Most of her projects are located in East Africa.

King Center Supported Research

2024 - 2025 Academic Year | Global Development Research Funding Grant

From farms to marketplaces: agriculture value chains and their role in promoting climate resilience and food security

This proposal seeks funding for field work and data collection for three ongoing projects based in Kenya, each addressing critical aspects of agriculture trade and economic development in the region. All three projects focus on agriculture supply/value chains and look at what is the role of supply/value chains in ensuring food security. The first RCT focusing on agriculture trade formalization is in its final stage and needs funding for a trader endline survey to untangle some of the mechanisms. The second RCT looks at matching and relational contracts within the supply  chain, namely between retailers and traders. In light of promising results from a large-scale pilot  run at the end of 2024, a PI visit to the field and additional qualitative work are crucial to refine the intervention prior to scaling-up the pilot to a full size RCT. Lastly, the third project is in its  exploratory phase and focuses on the impact of climate shocks on food prices in marketplaces,  taking into account the role played by supply chains in mitigating or promoting climate resilience.  This third project uses both secondary data and will need some primary data collection to  supplement the secondary data. This proposal would allow us to get access to the full market  dataset (we only have access to a subset of this secondary data for now) and to do some primary  data collection in the field to understand the structure and role of supply chains in passing through  shocks from farm production to consumers in marketplaces.

2023 - 2024 Academic Year | Global Development Research Funding

Understanding (informal) agriculture trade: value/supply chains, market power and price formation in East Africa

In low- and middle-income countries, a large share of agriculture and food trade is conducted by small-scale informal traders who avoid official checkpoints. These informal trade flows are completely missing from official trade statistics used for policy; despite playing a crucial role in food security, food prices and livelihoods in those areas. This project will work towards shedding light on the role played by informal agriculture trade (especially in East Africa), understanding agriculture supply/value chains (how products get from farmers to consumers in markets) including intermediaries' markups; and exploring how prices are set in local markets. This project uses a combination of existing data collected through a randomized control trial carried out in 2021, secondary data and a new randomized control trial being launched in 2024.