<p>This dissertation has three essays that are focused on understanding smallholder farmers’ choices in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly, Malawi. The first essay uses a clustered randomized control trial (RCT) to evaluate the impact of storage and commitment constraints on farmers’ legume storage bevavior. The second essay is motivated by the incomplete quality information problem within informal markets that undermines consumers’ demand for quality and lead to lemons market. In this essay, we use a clustered RCT along with the Becker DeGroote Marshack auctions amongst 1,098 farm households to evaluate whether providing food safety (aflatoxins) information increases consumers’ demand for grain quality and whether that demand for quality varies depending on food availability. The third essay uses stochastic dynamic programming to explore the role of market risk and expenditure shocks on smallholder farmers’ storage and marketing behavior.</p>

The rapid integration of intermittent renewable energy sources (IRES) has caused a growing demand for power system flexibility on energy markets all over Europe. Being the only commercially proven large scale energy storage technology, pumped storage hydro power (PSHP) has by several studies been suggested as an efficient solution to miti­gate the impact of IRES. However, despite the perceived technical demand profit­ability remains as a major obstacle for PSHP development. In this study, a market requirement for PSHP profitability, defined in terms of price volatility, is pre­sented. Considering capital and operational expenditures as well as modelled potential price arbitrage revenues for a greenfield PSHP plant, it may be used as a tool for initial assessments of PSHP profitability in relation to market outlooks or modelled future prices. The results have further been used in a case study, where the price volatility required to motivate a restora­tion of the now decommissioned Swedish PSHP plant Juktan has been determined. The results show that the high capital expenditures characterising PSHP development do comprise in a high risk for developers; while feasibility depends on the sustainment of a highly volatile price climate during several decades, energy markets are often extremely uncertain.