Sharecropping Contracts in Rural India: A Note Ananish Chaudhuri Washington State University and Pushkar Maitra University of Sydney Abstract In this paper we examine the terms of sharecropping contracts using data from rural India. We examine the effect of - (1) the sharing of input costs between landlord and tenant; (2) the existence of outside employment opportunities for the tenant; and (3) the tenant’s capacity to borrow - on the share parameter. We regress the share paid by the household on a set of cultivating household and village level characteristics and find that cost sharing and the existence of outside employment opportunities significantly affect the share parameter. Corresponding Author: Pushkar Maitra Department of Economics University of Sydney Sydney, NSW 2006 Australia pushkarm@econ.usyd.edu.au 1. Introduction