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Abstract
This article examines the impact of a joint organic and fair trade certification on productivity and material costs based on data collected from 277 smallholder black pepper farmers in India. We estimate a multinomial endogenous switching regression along with a counterfactual analysis to ascertain the effects of certification. Our results indicate that certified farmers have higher yields. Counterfactual study shows that conventional farmers can increase their yields by 35% with less than half the costs by venturing into organic and fair trade networks. Further, treatment and transitional heterogeneity effects reveal that a joint organic and fair trade certification has the strongest effect on productivity for the less successful farmers.