About

Dr. Roberto Gallardo, Vice President for Engagement and Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University, is involved in research related to the evolving urban-rural divide, renewable energy, farmland market dynamics, and the future of farming. He is also associated with the Department of Agricultural Economics and contributes to the Farm Policy Study Group, where he presents on macro indicator analysis and farmland market dynamics. His work focuses on understanding the economic and social factors influencing agriculture, rural communities, and land use, with an emphasis on policy implications and sustainable development.

Research topics

• Business
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Ecology
• Demographic economics
• Economic growth
• Gender studies
• Engineering
• Environmental science
• Toxicology
• Agricultural science
• Biology
• Geography
• Biotechnology
• Economics
• Socioeconomics

Selected publications

• Dataset and background information for "Solving the participation puzzle" project (NSF award BCS 2242087)

  Purdue University Research Repository · 2026-03-26

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  <p>What motivates people to manage natural resources sustainably? Rational choice theory says people are motivated by material rewards, but cultural anthropology and other social and behavioral science literatures have shown that people are motivated by values and norms, which can be eroded by material rewards. The two theoretical stands have come to loggerheads over how to partner with people living close to the natural environment to conserve natural resources. Initially informed by rational choice theory, programs were set up worldwide to pay rural people to conserve natural resources, with payments conditional on households meeting contractual obligations such as not deforesting or polluting water. Some have argued that such payments erode intrinsic motivation to conserve, and that conditionality excludes vulnerable groups—households with small plots, women, the ultra-poor—because they do not have enough land and other resources to set aside for conservation. In theory, removing conditionality in incentive-based conservation programs would increase program participation, particularly attracting more members of vulnerable groups, because it would lower barriers to participation, thus improving the fairness of program outcomes. A clustered randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) program in rural Bolivia was conducted during 2016-2021 to test this idea. Unexpectedly, rates of participation in the program were similar, on average, in the conditional and unconditional arms of the RCT. The puzzle of why an unconditional treatment did not affect average participation rate motivates this proposal. Our broad objective is to build on theories from cultural anthropology, social psychology, and economics to understand people’s willingness to accept payments for conservation. To do so we used qualitative and quantitative ethnographic methods to gather new data from Bolivia to test hypotheses and explain mechanisms behind unexpected findings from the RCT. The hypotheses center on the role of trust, intrinsic motivation, and perceptions of fair compensation. Our multidisciplinary team was well qualified, having used ethnographic methods in other RCTs in rural Bolivia.</p> <p>The project was approved as an exempt study by Purdue's Institutional Review Board on September 14, 2023 (IRB-2023_1189). Only adults > 18 yo were included in the study. </p> <p>The publication includes:</p> <ul> <li>Dataset (in comma-separated and Stata formats) from 163 households in the municipality of Samaipata, Bolivia</li> <li>Data codebook (in text format)</li> <li>Data analysis code (in Stata .do format)</li> <li>Randomized controlled trial procedure and assignment (in text format)</li> <li>Notes from the workshop on mixed-methods research organized on October 17th, 2025 (in text format)</li> <li>Presentation delivered by the team at the workshop on October 17th, 2025 (in Microsoft PowerPoint format)</li> </ul>

  PublisherDOI

• Co-production of knowledge and strategies to enhance the cyanide-safe cassava value chain in Nigeria

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-06-21

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• <p>The Unexpected Role of Conditionality in Promoting Relational Values: Evidence from A Bolivian Incentive-Based Conservation Program</p>

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Co-production of knowledge and strategies to enhance the cyanide-safe cassava value chain in Nigeria

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-06-21

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The unexpected role of conditionality in shaping relational values within incentive-based conservation programs

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Economic convergence, intragenerational economic mobility, and inequality in a native Amazonian small-scale society of Indigenous People in Bolivia

  World Development · 2025-11-22

  articleOpen access

  • Adult intragenerational rank mobility matters for quality of life. • There are no quantitative studies of intragenerational mobility in small-scale societies. • Mobility study of Tsimane’ Indigenous People in Bolivia starts to fill the gap. • Like developed economies, pockets of rank immobility appear at the top. • But there was also more rank mobility & the bottom (especially men) converged fast. Adult intragenerational mobility reflects society’s ability to reward effort and tame society-wide inequality. In developed economies, mobility is modest and correlates negatively with economic inequality. Little is known quantitatively from direct observations about long-term intragenerational mobility in small-scale societies of the Global South. To assess the external validity of findings about patterns of intragenerational mobility from developed economies, we use a yearly survey panel dataset (2002–2010) of adults from a society of native Amazonians (Tsimane’) in Bolivia practicing farming, fishing, hunting, and plant gathering. We estimate (a) convergence rates (or the speed of catch up) of adults in the bottom quintile to the rest of the population sample, (b) mobility defined as the change in quintile rank in economic outcomes between 2002 and 2010, and (c) the associations of economic mobility in rank between 2002 and 2010 with society-wide economic inequality in 2010, measured with the Gini coefficient. Outcomes included flows (income, barter) and wealth measured with the value of livestock, locally produced goods, and commercial goods. We found unambiguous evidence of convergence (those at the bottom were fast approaching the rest) and considerable evidence of both upward and downward mobility among women and men across all outcomes. Mobility and economic inequality correlated negatively. We did not observe the modest economic mobility typical of developed economies, but we found pockets of immobility at the top and an inverse relation between upward mobility and inequality.

  PublisherDOI

• A field experiment on removing conditionality in environmental conservation payments

  Research Square · 2025-09-26

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Field Experiment on Removing Conditionality in Environmental Conservation Payments

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• <p>Does Nutrition Matter for Low-Income Consumers? Demand for Biofortified Sweetpotato Bread in Nigeria</p>

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Social networks and the demand for credence agricultural technologies

  Food Policy · 2025-08-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  • Agricultural social networks can help disseminate information about technologies that improve food quality and safety. • Demand for Aflasafe, an agricultural technology to control aflatoxins, was high among smallholder farmers in Senegal. • Agricultural social networks increased demand for Aflasafe among smallholder farmers with lower willingness to pay at baseline. • Participants increased their valuation of Aflasafe when their agricultural peers valued the benefits for consumption and seed. Little is known about the adoption of agricultural technologies that enhance unobservable attributes, such as food quality and food safety. Social networks can potentially be a key tool to disseminate information about such technologies, because informal discussions among network members could counter the lack of observability and awareness of the benefits of such technologies. To inform this issue, we conducted a field experiment that included experimental auctions and a lottery to estimate how social networks influence the demand for Aflasafe, a new food safety-enhancing technology, among smallholder farmers in Senegal. Aflasafe is an agricultural input that controls aflatoxins, which are unobservable carcinogenic compounds that contaminate grains and compromise their safety for human consumption. Despite the lack of any food-safety regulations or price incentives in the study area, we found that demand for Aflasafe was high at baseline after farmers were trained on its benefits. The results show that social networks increased demand for Aflasafe among participants who had a lower willingness to pay in the first period. These individuals likely needed the most convincing to adopt the technology. Further, we find suggestive evidence that having an Aflasafe adopter (“lottery winner”) who used the treated groundnut for own consumption and use as future seed in an individual’s network increases their demand. Having an adopter who used the treated groundnut for other purposes in an individual’s network is not associated with any change in an individual’s demand. These findings suggest that smallholder farmers – who are often both producers and consumers of their food – engage in discussions about technologies with unobservable benefits within their agricultural social networks. Thus, it seems possible, at least in the short term, that these networks can be harnessed to increase technology adoption by leveraging farmers’ concern about their health and food safety.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jacob Ricker‐Gilbert

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  25 shared

• Jonathan Morduch

  New York University

  17 shared

• Ricardo Godoy

  Brandeis University

  12 shared

• Zhao Ma

  9 shared

• Victòria Reyes-García

  Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats

  8 shared

• Stacy Prieto

  Agricultural & Applied Economics Association

  7 shared

• Ariela Zycherman

  NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research

  6 shared

• William R. Leonard

  Northwestern University

  5 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Wagner School of Public Service

  New York University

  2013

Awards & honors

• James C. Snyder Memorial Lecture
• AGEC Distinguished Ag Alumni
• Purdue Ag Alumni Association