Assessing the scope for insurance in rural communities usually requires a structural model of household behavior under risk. One of the few empirical applications of such models is the study by Rosenzweig and Wolpin (1993) who conclude that Indian farmers in the ICRISAT villages would not...

Donor agencies and recipient governments want to assess the effectiveness of aid-supported sector policies. Unfortunately, existing methods for impact evaluation are designed for the evaluation of homogeneous interventions (‘projects’) where those with and without ‘treatment’ can be...

This paper considers a general class of stochastic dynamic choice models with discrete and continuous decision variables. This class contains a variety of models that are useful for modeling intertemporal household decisions under risk. Our examples are drawn from the field of development...

There is a growing interest, notably in development economics, in extending project evaluation methods to the evaluation of multiple interventions (“programs”). In program evaluations one is interested in the aggregate impact of a program rather than the effect on individual beneficiaries....

There has been a revival of interest in the effect of risk on economic growth. We quantify both ex ante and ex post effects of risk using a stochastic version of the Ramsey model. We develop a simulation-based econometric methodology which allows us to estimate the model in the structural form...