is positively correlated with our measures of agricultural productivity and welfare. The coefficient of interest is statistically significant at the (i) 5 percent level in the regression of log of community median plot maize production per hectare and (i) 1 percent level in the regression of log of community median household real annual consumption expenditures per capita. The findings are in support of the hypothesis that local public goods can have substantial impacts on agricultural production and productivity, with parallel impacts on living standards.

Other noteworthy results from Table 4 concern the community education diversity and difference between the 10<sup>th</sup> and 90<sup>th</sup> percentile of the land ownership distribution. The negative and statistically significant effect of the latter variable on agricultural productivity may capture less dense informal insurance mechanisms and labor- and information-sharing arrangements, which are in turn directly negatively associated with agricultural productivity. The positive TSLS coefficient for the community education diversity in both regressions is likely to reflect the positive correlation of the variable with the overall education level in the community, which is in turn positively associated with the outcomes of interest. The community ethnic diversity has a positive coefficient that is statistically significant at the 5 percent level in column D, suggesting that such diversity has additional impacts on improving consumption outcomes, perhaps through greater density of supra-community networks. Lower temperatures, lower rainfall variability and location in more favorable agro-ecological zones are also similarly associated with better agricultural productivity and welfare outcomes.

Finally, the test results presented in the lower panel of Table 4, under columns B and D, form the econometric foundation for our claims regarding instrumental validity. We first discuss the overidentification test results. The null hypothesis of this test is that the instruments are jointly valid, and that the excluded instruments are correctly excluded from the estimated equation. For instrumental validity, and thereby the inability to reject the null hypothesis of the overidentification test, the test statistic should be statistically insignificant. Instrumental validity is proven in our case, at least empirically, by Sargan statistics that are highly statistically insignificant for both models. Complementing the over-identification tests, we report the result from the orthogonality test of each instrumental variable, which is simply a test of the exogeneity of a subset of instruments whose validity may be subject to scrutiny. The null hypothesis of the since do not control for household-specific substitution strategies. While these substitutes would theoretically have a positive impact on the outcomes of interest, they would be negative correlated with collective capacity to provide local public goods. This implies that the direction of correlation between the endogenous variable and the error term would be negative and that the positive OLS coefficient associated with the endogenous variable would increase following the use of TSLS. One test of this hypothesis is to exclude two likely substitutes that are currently included in the model, namely district-level 2008/09 rainy season measures of metric tons of fertilizer per household and MASAF wage funds per household, and confirm whether the OLS coefficient associated with the collection action capacity index goes down further. The results, which are available upon request, indicate that the OLS coefficient of interest decreases from 0.031 (statistically significant at the 5 percent level) to 0.022 (not statistically significant) in the regression of log of community median plot maize production per hectare, and similarly drops from 0.017 (statistically significant at the 10 percent level) to 0.016 (not statistically significant) in the regression of log of community median household total real annual consumption per capita.

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