Women’s contributions to agriculture are an essential factor in achieving food security in developing countries. In rice production, women’s involvement is usually limited to their labor participation. Differences in gender roles within the household hinder women from accessing productive resources and services compared to their male counterparts, leading to a gender gap in rice productivity. With the steady growth of rice productivity experienced in eastern India, it is essential to reduce the gender gap by providing women equal access to resources. However, there is little information on how the gender gap can be addressed between married couples in a patriarchal family structure like India. This dissertation analyzes the potential impact on rice productivity and input use when the spouse (wife) in the household has given access to resources (e.g., rice variety and credit). The first chapter analyzes the impact of a married couple’s decision-making strategy in choosing rice varieties on rice productivity and input use using an endogenous switching regression. The second chapter estimates the effect of access to financial services on technical efficiency using a stochastic production frontier framework. The last chapter evaluates how joint decision-making strategy influences the inverse relationship between farm size and rice productivity following a yield approach and quantile regression. The findings show that joint decision-making strategy choice leads to a higher rice yield and fertilizer usage while lower labor requirements. Regarding spouse access to financial resources, results show a significant difference in technological and managerial gaps. However, that households with access have a lower predicted rice yield than households without access. The last chapter shows that joint decision-making in the family still left the inverse relationship unchanged in examining the inverse relationship. The dissertation provides two significant implications. First, results provide evidence of gender-differentiated preferences for rice variety within the household that can affect rice productivity and input use. Second, the spouse’s access to credit does not necessarily lead to an increase in rice productivity. Thus, determining the primary purpose of why households avail financial services would be essential in analyzing its impact on productivity to avoid misleading results.

The global population is expected to reach 10.5 billion by 2050. With the increase in population, food production needs to increase by at least 70% in 2050. This would require a several-fold increase in food production. However, scarcity in land availability, a falling water table, weather variability, and an increase in the cost of agricultural operations have made this difficult. The gap between food supply and demand could be minimized if food losses are reduced during production, post-harvest activities, and food waste during consumption. This dissertation focuses on food loss (FL) by growers and food-waste (FW) by households. Specifically, the dissertation first, investigates the impact of vertical coordination on FL in India. Secondly, the dissertation examines the impact of offline and online shopping on FW by American households. The FL study uses farm-level data from India and a novel estimation method in the literature. Findings show that agribusiness firms rejected a significant quantity of the product due to quality standards. The amount of produce rejected was directly impacted by labor and transportation costs. Modeling and simulating the effects of labor and transport costs show that lowering labor and transport costs for the smallholder growers would reduce FL. The FW study uses scanner data of a popular retailing chain in the United States. Using the behavior of over-purchasing of impulse products and machine learning approach, the predict the over-purchasing of impulse products across online and offline (grocery stores) channels. The study finds that households over-purchase 29% more of impulse products (danish pastries, sweet bread, and cakes) when shopping online compared to offline shopping. The dissertation provides two critical insights related to the decision-making process of growers and grocery shoppers. First, growers' decision on reducing FL is related to the quantity of produce rejected by contracting firms and selling produce in the spot markets. Second, FW is significantly related to a grocery shopper’s choice of a shopping channel and the decision on how much to purchase.