Transplanting whereby, rather than seed being broadcast, seedlings are grown in a nursery and planted on the field later has a number of advantages. Total time required in the field is shorter, potentially allowing more intensive use of a given piece of land. Less seed is needed as germination rates in the nursery are higher. Seedlings are more developed at the time of planting and thus better able to compete with weeds. While labor needs at the transplanting stage are higher, this may be somewhat offset by lower requirements for weeding and other management later on.

In Kpong, yields of farmers who transplant are significantly higher than those who fail to do so in the same scheme with a yield difference of 12% (or 0.56 t/ha) in Kpong. Columns 4 and 5 show that transplanting farmers tend to be slightly younger (by 1.6 years) and more educated (by 0.7 years) than non-transplanters, spend 42% less on seed per hectare (262 GHC vs 151 GHC), use 36% more labor on land preparation (25.3 vs 18.6 days/ha) but, presumably due to higher yields, use similar levels of labor for field management and harvest. Male and female cultivators are equally likely to use transplanting to establish their crop.

Mechanized ploughing is almost universal, although the technology differs–power tillers are prevalent in Kpong and tractors in Weta, where the amount spent on ploughing per hectare is 43% lower. About half of farmers harvest using a combine, while the other half cut and thresh their crop manually, a practice that is more common in Weta (59% vs 48%). Overall, cultivators report 119 days between completion of planting and completion of harvest. Despite lower yields, the number of labor days spent is about 30% higher in Weta than in Kpong, with a higher share of days allocated to crop management. Female farmers perform a greater portion of the work in Weta, with roughly double the number of female family and hired labor days per hectare. Perhaps because they broadcast seed rather than transplant, Weta farmers spend 25% fewer days on planting but more days on management. In both locations, most harvest labor is hired.

# **3.2 Measuring personality traits**

To measure levels of cultivators’ non-cognitive skills, we use responses to 25 questions developed by industrial psychologists and group them into 9 categories. The questions, reproduced in appendix A together with the relevant groupings, are identical to those in De Mel _et al._ (2010).<sup>7</sup> Questions were translated into the local languages (GA-Dangme and Ewe) with responses coded on a scale of one to five, five indicating “agree strongly” and one indicating “disagree strongly”. After rescaling responses from -2 to 2, responses in each of the 8 categories are summed up and divided by the number of responses per category to obtain an indicator in the [-2,2] range.

> 7 They have been shown to predict innovation and success for micro entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka (De Mel _et al._ 2009). Having the same set of questions allows us to test if traits that predicted micro-entrepreneurial success in Sri Lanka are relevant for smallholder productivity and technology adoption in Ghana, implying some transferability of personality traits across activities and cultural contexts. The procedure is identical to that in De Mel _et al._ (2010), except that the construct values there are not divided by the number of questions comprising the category.

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