Benjamin Schwab

Benjamin Schwab is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Kansas State University's College of Agriculture. He holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2011), an M.A. from the same institution, and a B.A. in Economics and Middle Eastern Studies from Rutgers University.

Dr. Schwab's research spans three interconnected domains:

• Development Economics: Focused on poverty, food security, and household decision making through large-scale impact evaluations in Africa and the Middle East in collaboration with World Food Programme, UNICEF, Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the World Bank.
• Cannabis Policy: Examining implications of changing cannabis regulations on agriculture, environment, and rural land use across the United States.
• Agriculture-Health-Nutrition: Investigating health-labor market connections in the US and global food safety-nutrition relationships.

His publication record includes articles in American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Journal of Health Economics, and World Development, with recent work focusing on risk and credit constraints in Bangladesh, mobile money's role in Kenyan household resilience, and methodological innovations in survey design. Prior to Kansas State, Dr. Schwab was an Associate Research Fellow at IFPRI's Poverty, Health and Nutrition Division, where he was a National Institute for Mental Health trainee in Health Economics.

Dr. Schwab teaches AGEC 615: Global Agricultural Development and maintains active collaborations with USAID's Feed the Future Innovation Lab on agricultural mechanization and postharvest storage technologies. His interdisciplinary approach bridges agricultural economics, development economics, health economics, and policy analysis with practical implications for food security and rural development.